Blinded by the Light

The disappearance of the night sky

Stars seen in the Sahara Desert. (desireetravels.com) 

There are places deep in the woods of the Canadian wilderness or far in the vast deserts of Africa where you can look up and observe intense webs of scintillating stars. Unfortunately, the number of places on Earth with a stunning view of the Milky Way are slowly diminishing. Every year, more artificial light from homes, streetlights, and businesses leeches out from the bounds of cities and into rural areas fading out the starlight.

Growing up in the central valley of California I lived on the frontier of where suburbia met unending farmland. When my house was first built, a year before I was born, nothing existed to the east. When the sun went down darkness settled in over the neighborhood and only the porch lights of a few homes in the west and the orange glow of a few sparsely planted streetlights competed with the stars. I believe it was because of the miles of rural land beyond my back fence that I have fond memories of gazing out to the stars at night, a thing many people are not lucky enough to do.

As I aged alongside my neighborhood, I was conscious of the way the number of stars visible, even in the dead of night, became less and less. The city moved away from the orange glow of high-pressure sodium streetlamps to the intense brightness of white LEDs. More homes in the east meant more porchlights to keep the darkness away. The change was more noticeable when my family took camping trips into the Sierra Nevadas or to the central coast where we could escape the hustle and bustle of home and catch a glimpse of pure starlight at night. I still remember how excited my dad was to try his new iPhone app that used the camera to tell you exactly which stars you were looking at in real time. From our humble campsite in Shaver Lake I learned about Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and Orion’s Belt. I would go back home and search for the same stars at night, but their shine was not quite the same.

The increasing amount of artificial light infiltrating my beloved night sky is known as light pollution. Light pollution is the over-illumination of any area including using excessive amounts of light for a given purpose as well as misdirected light that falls beyond where it is intended. Imagining a place where artificial light is so abundant it becomes a nuisance, most major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City come to mind. Towering skyscrapers illuminate the sky 24 hours a day. In these hubs of human activity there are many reasons for the use of artificial light. Practical extension of productive hours, residential buildings' needs, and even entertainment from athletics stadiums to times square and its colorful displays rely on artificial lights after the sun goes down. The collective effect of all this light is called sky glow, a hazy dome of light radiating in all directions from the skyline of a city. This is best seen from a point of view outside the city.

The thing about light pollution is that it is not just happening in big cities. Like I experienced in my smalltown, places all over the world have increasingly limited views of the night sky because of our dependency on bright lights along highways, in parking lots, around school campuses, and many other places at night.

This summer I attended basic training for my first year at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Located 45 miles north of New York City the campus is surrounded by hundreds of acres of forested land in, and around which summer trainings are conducted. Throughout the grueling summer, moments of peace and gratitude were rare to come by. While sleeping out in the woods I was transported back to the camping trips of my youth and each night my gaze was drawn upward to the stars. Only, there was not the light show waiting for me that I expected being so deep in the woods. Even in the middle of the clearest, darkest night only the closest and brightest stars could be seen, like triangle 2 on the Nasa wheel. This is because the effects of light pollution from cities like New York can be felt up to one hundred miles away. Also, when we returned to the main campus, I was more observant of the bright lights in the barracks and in common areas that are never extinguished. While stargazing is not the main mission of the military academy, I can't help but yearn to see the twinkle of familiar constellations.

Many go night to night without acknowledging the stars existence, or in most cases, their absence. With every passing generation the sympathy for the stars seems to diminish. Younger people today do not realize the extent to which the stars' intensity has been muted. Once a bright guiding light depended on for navigation, timekeeping, and mythology now reduced to a screensaver, a quiet twinkle in the background. How we choose to control the spread of artificial light in our cities and towns will determine the future of the stars and whether we can continue to gaze into their wonders.

Works Cited

Brigantty, Reynaldo. “New York Skyline at Night,” Pexels.com, 2 Jan. 2018, www.pexels.com/photo/city-lights-under-night-sky-771881/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.

“Bright Lights: Big Cities at Night.” Www.esa.int, European Space Agency, 16 Dec. 2014, www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Research/Bright_lights_big_cities_at_night#:~:text=The%20light%20from%20shopping%20streets%20and%20street%20lighting. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

Chepesiuk, Ron. “Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 117, no. 1, 2009, pp. A20–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066663. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

“Light Pollution.” Cities at Night, Stars4All Initiative, citiesatnight.org/light-pollution/. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.

Norman, Derek M. “Why Is New York City’s Skyline Always Lit Up?” The New York Times, 26 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/nyregion/nyc-skyline-lights.html. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.

Skalle, Desirée. “The Sahara Desert between the Sand Dunes and Stars in Morocco,” Desirée Travels, 4 May 2019, www.desireetravels.com/the-sahara-desert-between-the-sand-dunes-and-stars-in-morocco/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

Stanley, A. (2022, Jul 16). Stop ruining starry nights. New York Times Retrieved from https://login.usmalibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/stop-ruining-starry-nights/docview/2690336635/se-2

Troche, Kat. “Check Your Sky Quality with Orion! - NASA Science.” Science.nasa.gov, 15 Nov. 2023, science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/check-your-sky-quality-with-orion/. Accessed 28 Nov. 2023.

Stars seen in the Sahara Desert. (desireetravels.com)