The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States
I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.
People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.
So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.
The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.
Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.
The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.
I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry
When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring
When you see a properly dark starscape
You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky
The universe is infinite. So are the stars
I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any
You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.
The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.
And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.
You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.
The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks
And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.
this is not a shot from a space telescope overlayed behind a woods, or anything. that’s not the sky as kepler or hubble or james webb see it. that’s the sky from a dark sky park in michigan. that’s the view you are missing out on from right here on earth. that’s the view that has been stolen from you.
I fell in love with the sky as a child growing up in western Minnesota, miles from a small town, near a massive lake and just downhill from an 18-hole golf course - the pure darkness broken only by a single bright light I could escape by hauling my telescope up that hill or into a nearby field
I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me
that’s what’s been taken from us all
OH OKAY so actually im fully ugly crying snotty-sobbing about this. what
this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you
(full map of ~75k is too much for me to load, but i got to 40k! very laggy, but worth it.)
We can have this back btw. This is solvable, and it’s not THAT hard. It’s not pollution like greenhouse gases in the atmosphere where we have to stop making it worse AND clean up the mess we already made. With light pollution, all we have to do is stop doing it. Use shielded outdoor lights. Don’t run lights when they don’t need to be run. Install motion sensors and dimmers. And it’s not expensive- it literally SAVES money. Push for these policies at the local level. Get the stars back.
