I think many people have never experienced and don't realize how mind-bending a clear night sky in the winter without light pollution is. You need to get pretty far from civilization but when you do you will see so many stars, colors and effects you had no idea were visible without a telescope. The first time I experienced it I couldn't believe my eyes and it redefined my perception of space.
An added bonus of a dark sky is that with a good pair of eyes (and more democratically, with a set of binoculars) you can see all sort of clusters, nebulae, Jupiter's moons and e.g., Andromeda.
While not as breathtaking as the panoramic view of a truly dark sky, experiencing this "micro-structure" is also a mind-expanding experience: The sky is no longer a set of random point sources. Its an organic "thing" enclosing other "things".
I once got to watch the sunset from the peak of Mauna Kea. After descending to a less stressful altitude, we spent some time stargazing. I've never seen the sky like that before, or since; it felt like you could see the depth in the galaxy. I was no longer looking up at the dome of the sky, studded with stars; I was looking out, from the side of a planet, into the wide open space of the universe.
I had planned a trip to the Haleakala Crater in Maui for the highly-recommended sunrise, and our airBnb turned out to have a pretty significant ant problem, so we ended up going a few hours early.
I don't know why anyone would even mention the sunrise considering how incredible that night sky was. The experience was similar to seeing the grand canyon: too big, beautiful, and intricate for my brain to take it all in. It was absolutely breathtaking. Also, absurdly cold (we were well prepared and it was still not enough)
The sunrise was fine. Very pretty, to be sure. But the main event was that night sky, for which I would have shown up a few hours earlier than I did had I known about it.
I completely agree with your overall point about the fantastic night sky but it should be no surprise that people suggest sunrise, as the Hawaiian Haleakala literally translates to "house of the sun".
I didn't know that, thanks. Also, I don't think it's _not_ worth going up there for the sunrise. It is. It's beautiful, and probably worth the drive.
I mostly just think it's weird that nobody even _mentions_ the transcendent night sky you might happen upon during a new moon or moonless part of the night.
I had the same experience at around 10,000 ft in the cascades. Once you're above the thickest part of the atmosphere, a whole new dimension opens up in the sky. Everywhere you look, in the space between the stars, there are more stars, infinitely receding to the edge of the universe. The sky starts to look more like a fractal than a few points of light scattered around.
I have never been at that altitude but I had a similar experience in the Sahara a few years ago. My experience was enhanced with a little bit of Moroccan hashish. I laid on a dune and gazed at the sky and the heavens were blazing with light. I felt like I was falling into the stars. It was unforgettable. A clear sky at night is the farthest thing from dark!
It sounds like to get these experiences I'm going to have to go far out of my way and pay a lot of money. Our ancient ancestors got it for free, and I wonder if they thought anything of it.
We probably owe the roots of all science (and thus technology) to the clear dark sky observations of ancient ancestors. Astronomical observatories were common in all early civilizations and it there where some of the roots of mathematical thinking begin (the other being credit accounting tools :-)
Astronomical observations are in a sense simpler and cleaner (and until the invention of accurate timepieces, compasses etc.) also of extreme practical use.
The reason is likely that our normal down-to-Earth environment is too complex and chaotic to be parsed. Observation of nearby processes gets things wrong because of overlapping effects. E.g. Aristotle thought that the natural state is for things to stop moving when they stop being pushed by a force. This is only the case because down here friction is dominant.
> have to go far out of my way and pay a lot of money
it should not be like this. A lot of light pollution is due to just not giving a damn about side-effects.
I’ve considered whether the human concept of religion is possibly rooted in debates as to whether other things are out there. Because once you’ve had that conscious thought I think it’s a short hop to making up stories about who/what it is that could be living out there. Time passes and it becomes indoctrination for many, and on the mind for most at times of their life even if just out of curiosity.
Definitely not on a hill over this but it’s just been a thought I’ve wrestled with at some point. I’m sure it’s not even original at all.
True religion at its core is about insuring happiness, and a big part of being happy is having a way to explain the world around you so your mind is at ease.
Sure, they didn't have to pay with money, past a certain point they didn't even use money, but they paid with (much) shorter lives. Money is just the cost of self-determination.
But if you just want to get somewhere on top of a mountain with no light pollution, you don't have to spend very much money, unless you happen to live in an area of the world with no mountains.
> Sure, they didn't have to pay with money, past a certain point they didn't even use money, but they paid with (much) shorter lives. Money is just the cost of self-determination.
the cost of a clear night sky does not have to be "no technology". We don't need nearly as many streetlights, lighted signs, houselights, etc as we have.
I've lived in areas where regulation restricts lighting choices; it is a good thing.
Excess lighting is called light pollution, and it is a societal choice to put up with it. Society can choose otherwise and help us rediscover our wonder at the world.
If you live in the northeast of the US, Medawisla is a fantastic "dark sky park" located in Maine. Unforgettable experience, highest possible reccomendation.
Far out of your way depending on where you live, sure, but not necessarily pay a lot of money.
Like I got to see the Milky Way up in the Porcupine Mountains a couple of years ago in Northern Michigan, off the shore of Lake Superior, while my wife was hunting for Yooperlites (rocks that glow under a UV light) on the beach late at night. Other than an 8 hour drive's worth of gas and a fairly inexpensive AirBnb it didn't cost anything extra to see it.
And you can always move to one of these places, too, and see it all the time. Solidly middle class homes up there can be had for about $200k in small towns/cities, then you only need to drive about 15 minutes to get out of town to see it.
And if you're in the western US, it looks like there's a lot more options. Much darker in general out there outside the major cities.
I do miss when you could see these things just outside of town in Illinois though. Used to drive just a bit outside of town and park on the side of a rural road and just look up and see it, when I was a kid/teen. There's almost no place in Illinois where you can see the Milky Way nowadays (and where I live now it's gray-white on the map, so I only see a few pin points in the sky right now, it's terrible).
The Milky Way is visible most nights (except when cloudy) on St. George Island, Florida, about 60 minutes from Tallahassee or 6.5 hours drive from Atlanta. It's stunning. Most nights I saw meteors as well. However, the northern sky is a little obstructed by trees.
White Sands National Monument in New Mexico has incredible views of the stars.
I saw beautiful stars canoeing on a lake in the Adirondack mountains.
I once saw comet Hyakutake by accident when I was riding in the back of a van on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I think it was around the Fort Littleton exit.
I suppose it depends on your starting point how expensive it is to see the stars. However, I agree that there is just too much artificial light. I get that we feel much safer and less bored, but there's something lost by not having the easy access to the night sky.
> Our ancient ancestors got it for free, and I wonder if they thought anything of it.
Not sure what they thought of it, but I think it's telling how aware they were of the night sky as an active environment, e.g. the movements of the planets, and the relationships between events in the sky and our seasons (even though the their explanatory models were wrong).
On a clear night - especially in winter - before the invention of fire, it's all you'd be aware of. No wonder that they made patterns (constellations) of the brighter stars.
> experiencing this "micro-structure" is also a mind-expanding experience: The sky is no longer a set of random point sources. Its an organic "thing" enclosing other "things".
Galileo was immediately astonished by this when he made his first telescope and instantly saw the complexity of things up in the sky.
Jupiter's moons? Have you actually seen them? I think that I saw them a few years ago, as a line instead of as distinct dots. I even asked on Stack Exchange at the time:
My best experience of this was at Mt. Everest base-camp (Tibet side) at 5,364 metres (17,598 ft)
Not just no light pollution, but much less atmosphere too! It looked like those long exposure images of the Milky Way. There aren't words available to describe how incredible it was. I’ll just state that it was one of the highlights of my life!
i think one of the greatest crimes of the modern world is light pollution. it has completely redefined nearly everyone's perception of the universe and themselves in a really tragic way.
we would all be better off with fewer lights on buildings, and fewer streetlights. there is no reason for most of them, and the cost is existentially incredible.
Yes there is, it's crime. Street lights deter crime.
Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
I love to see the night sky as well, but I don't want to pretend there aren't extremely good reasons for street lighting, and those reasons aren't going away.
That being said, are there ways to reduce outdoor lighting of giant industrial parking lots, of stadiums at 3 am, or whole floors of skyscrapers when 99% of people have gone home? Sure. But at the same time, reducing nighttime lighting by 50% isn't really going to make any difference in sky visibility. It's more about not wasting electricity.
I'm talking mostly about urban areas though -- in rural areas where there's already a decent amount of visibility and the population is small enough that most roads already don't have street lights, then regulation can actually make a difference, e.g. banning always-on floodlights on people's driveways.
Kinda, sometimes. But this field is also fraught with tons of "bad implementations of a good idea", making the problem worse, as well as intuitions that don't hold up to empirical studies.
Classic example is a neighborhood adds extra bright streetlamps and neighbors install extra-bright flood lights on their garages. This illuminates some areas, but the areas that are missed become even "darker" because the extra light in people's eyes ruins night vision. Hiding in the bushes with your black thieving skimask (or along the fence line, or just off the road) becomes even more effective, and everyone else just gets a bright streetlight shining into their bedroom window all night long.
There's a whole subculture of designers talking about what makes effective street lighting, but it basically comes down to less blue light aimed more downwards.
And the best crime deterrent is having a lively neighborhood with more eyes on the street in the Jacobs-ey fashion. I heard of one crime study that considered lighting and cameras and all those things but found the best predictor of low crime rates was how many dogs lived in the neighborhood (and therefore people outside walking their dogs).
It's even worse; many cities have opted for blue, narrow-band LED street lighting in recent years which is actually missing so much from the color spectrum that your vision operates worse within the lit areas, and it gets harder to detect boundaries between objects and motion. Not to mention it screws with peoples' circadian rhythms.
What we have is a situation where our city, state and federal governments know jack shit about the science behind proper lighting or why it's so important for both people and wildlife to get high-quality, whole-spectrum, 10-25KHz+ PWM lighting.
And contractors take advantage of this, charging exorbitant amounts of money for intentionally sub-par lighting systems. It's a crime against both nature and humanity.
> There's a whole subculture of designers talking about what makes effective street lighting, but it basically comes down to less blue light aimed more downwards.
Considering the context of crime prevention, it is rather ironic therefore that police stations traditionally have none other than blue lamps above their doors!
I'd be willing to bet this isn't the case: even in unsafe areas dogs need to go outside to do their business. I doubt there's a natural experiment out there that could demonstrate causality...
Regarding crime and driving safety, it does seem like a suboptimal solution that may even trigger some Jevons paradox. Are drivers going faster because it's well lit? Will people be less prudent when walking through it alone? etc.
On the good side of the spectrum, I've never experienced a city as dark as Tokyo at night, which is also one of the safest on both accounts...
> Will people be less prudent when walking through it alone?
So you're blaming victims for being mugged -- or worse? Because they weren't "prudent" enough?
Rather than realizing that dark areas create opportunities for criminals where they won't be recognized, or caught on camera, and where they can escape without people spotting them?
The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
> So you're blaming victims for being mugged -- or worse? Because they weren't "prudent" enough?
Of course not, I am merely pointing the fact that the feeling of safety may not be actual safety. Changing the environment alters the behaviour of criminals and potential victims.
You also ignored that in the same sentence I blamed perpetrators: imprudent drivers.
> The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
That's basically where I was going with this.
As if the Japanese had always been tidy, the Dutch always fervent cyclists, the Italians smug about their food quality, etc. Culture shifts.
> Yes there is, it's crime. Street lights deter crime.
> Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
Accepting your points for convenience, wouldn't we get the same benefits with lights that only pointed downward? And if you further restrict to warmer colors (which interfere less with low-light sensitivity, also less diffraction reducing light pollution), with a sensible but low max intensity (again keeping the human eye more dark-sensitive, allowing better visibility into the non-illuminated spaces)?
Reducing nighttime lighting by 50% would make a huge difference in sky visibility.
There's a lot of streetlamps that switched to early versions of LED bulbs that start glowing purple as they age. I've actually really come to like the purple color illuminating streets, it's much easier on the eyes than the bright white.
Ironically, LED lighting, which is much more environmentally friendly, will make light pollution worse because of its frequency (blueish, which gets scattered by the atmosphere) and because it is cheaper to leave on at night.
LEDs can do oranges/reds just fine, it is just that blues are cheaper for interesting historic reasons (and people just love blue). LEDs can do better reds than anything that used to be used for outdoor lighting and there's some hope that LED lighting could help red shift outdoor lighting, eventually. (The redder it is, the less it interferes with night vision the less overall light needs to be spilled to seem as bright.)
You might be surprised how much your eyes can adjust to see if there are truly no other lights. Often in urban areas what we see as "dark" is really our eyes unable to see details the unlit areas because of stray light from streetlamps. In a dark rural area, a full moon is plenty bright. Thus the "harvest moon"
> In a dark rural area, a full moon is plenty bright.
I completely agree. But, it's very rarely a full moon.
When there's no moon at all, which is literally half the time, you might be surprised at how pitch black it is at night. Or just, you know, when there's heavy clouds.
Greatest crimes? Dumping PFAS and mercury into our ecosystem? Sure. Acid rain? Yeah. Bright cities? I think there's a long list of 'crimes' I'd put before that, and I love the night sky.
Some of these things won't be gone for generations or more, whereas you can turn lights off pretty easily. Ideally we'll swap out the older designs of streetlights and such as better designs become prevalent and there's economic incentives to do so.
Well, that depends. In general, there's no need for street lights to be on when there's no traffic. But I grew up traveling throughout my country from rural to main capital and there was always an area of the highway without street lights. That area was noticeably more dangerous because you simply see less, and have less reaction time. Especially during rain or snow or other extreme weather. It isn't just other cars. It is also deer who might pass the highway, for example. And that area was in a forest. If there were some kind of way to have them more intelligently work on/off (for example by seeing phone signals come closer) I'd wager we'd already have such. I actually dislike that premise and would like to agree with you (selfishly: I'd like my kids to grow up on a livable planet), so I hope you can prove me wrong.
There was a Cadillac from 2000 that had night vision in a HUD style design [1]. That never caught on, but there's no reason we couldn't have a really great implementation of that now.
I don't know if an IR emmitter would be reasonable, but that could augment the headlights to provide some really good visibility even without street lights.
The greatest crime? What? We are literally pumping plastics and carcinogens in to the air 24/7, poisoning the ground, and deforesting the planet.
Some light pollution is unfortunate but it’s essentially trivial in comparison. It causes no long term damage and doesn’t really do anything but make the sky less interesting.
My family used to have a ranch and in college I went up there to work off a debt to my parents. I stayed in a cabin at the top of a ridge above the valley the ranch sat in. The ranch was about 7 miles outside of the nearest town, a small place of about 400 people, way up in the northeast corner of California.
One moonless night I walked outside and looked up and my jaw dropped at how startlingly bright the sky was with stars. It was like a long-exposure photograph but in the highest resolution my eyes could see.
One thing that always amazes me is just how much you can see on the ground in a moonless, cloudless night when you're far from anything else, especially in the desert.
Having lived on a Caribbean island, I can relate to this visual sensation. Let me only tell you further that when coupled with the auditory expeience of the rhythmic ocean waves washing against the shoreline, it amplifies the entire encounter for me.
I grew up in a small town and my wife grew up in big cities. On our trip to Morocco we were on a camping trip to a desert and she asked me looking at the night sky: “What is this huge white thing across the sky?”. Took me a while to realize that she was asking about Milky Way.
I also grew up in a smallish town, it was always odd to hear visitors comment on the sky. It was just normal to see many stars, even in town. Visiting big cities at night always had an oppressive feeling to it, like having been mugged.
The first time I saw the Milky Way with my bare eyes, I almost fell over. The sky looked like static from an old TV set. There were so many stars, it was overwhelming.
Another important thing is to give your eyes time to fully adapt to darkness. In my experience this can take hours. The best stargazing experiences I’ve had have been camping under the open sky without a tent, where I would awake in my sleeping bag in the middle of the night and just be absolutely amazed at the stars above me.
Colours? Are you sure you can really see colours? The astrophotography stuff is "enhanced" to get colours.
I've been in the Namib desert in Namibia around the Orange river at night, although not during winter. There are loads of stars, but it's not colourful like the pictures and people will be underwhelmed if they have that expectation.
I took a group of people who had only lived in cities into the countryside to watch a meteor shower. It was fun seeing their minds blown when there were more than like 10 stars.
One thing I can't believe not everyone has seen is Andromeda. What's more is it doesn't even seem to be common knowledge that you can see it.
If you're in the southern hemisphere the coalsack nebula is cool although a bit scary.
I recently was on a 2000m high mountain in the Bavarian Alps during a clear night and it was truly breathtaking how many stars were visible. I grew up in the countryside where it's also very dark at night, but I haven't been out there at night for years.
Me too, I was on Formentera, which is an island off the east coast of Spain, just below Ibiza.
It's a small Island, only accessible by boat. One summer evening I went for a walk along the beach with my partner and we stood there in the clear night - with no light pollution, with the whole milky way above us. There were thousands and thousands of stars I had never seen before in a giant array that stretched across the whole sky. Subtle colours and brightness differences gave the milky way a structure and randomness at the same time, it was an incredibly beautiful and humbling experience, and changed my perspective of the universe too.
Also, it can be hard to navigate the sky if you're not used to it. The patterns of stars that you can see instantly in more polluted areas get a lot of "background noise" and you need to relearn the sky to a degree.
I've never seen it myself, but I plan to. I once showed to colleagues a photo of what can be seen by naked eye (the milky way) and they would not believe me even remotely (it wasn't super exposed).
What's special about the winter? My great-grandparents on my dad's side lived in the California high desert, maybe 50 miles or so from Edward's Air Force Base, when I was a kid and we visited every year for Independence Day. A week and a half after the summer solstice and I've still never seen more stars or more of the Milky Way outer rim than I did back then.
How held back might science be in an alternate history with one change: a permanently cloudy sky. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, would all have had so much less purchase on the shape of the universe to build their theories on. So much science depends on the fundamental insights from those models.
We would be a more inward focused civilization, and lesser for it.
It reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy's third-of-five book Life, the Universe and Everything
> Krikkiters
> This race of quiet, polite, charming and rather whimsical humanoids caused the most devastating war in the history of the Galaxy (with over two "grillion" casualties). Their homeworld, Krikkit, is surrounded by a black cloud, so they had no knowledge of the universe outside their world. When a spaceship crashed on the surface of Krikkit, the inhabitants quickly stripped it of its secrets and used them to create their own "flimsy piece of near-junk" craft, Krikkit One. Upon reaching the outer edge of the dust cloud and seeing the galaxy for the first time, the people of Krikkit marveled at its beauty before being gripped with fear of it and casually deciding to destroy it, famously remarking "It'll have to go." The Earth game of cricket is a racial memory of the events of the Krikkit Wars.
Asimov also wrote The Caves of Steel, set in a future where Humans live on Earth in completely enclosed underground cities. Robots farm and mine on the surface.
Absolutely! A few times I have seen the full grandeur of this on the west coast of Tasmania. Highly recommend. Also neat seeing all those satellites flying about after sunset.
