Why We Need to Restrict Light Pollution

When I was a kid, I lived in a small town that was more or less out in the middle of nowhere. Most businesses would close up around six (give or take), and most people stayed home. There were some streetlights, but not a lot. And at night, there were stars.

Nowadays, living in a city where the night sky has a perpetual glow, there aren’t many stars to see—and this in a city that’s over 1,600 m (a mile) above sea level. The planets still manage to work their way through the illuminated din, and they say maybe a couple of hundred of the brightest stars manage to shine their distant light on us, but mostly, the sky is devoid of the wonder I remember from my youth when all you had to do on a clear night was look up and there was the universe.

I think we need to increase our efforts to let the night sky shine through as fewer and fewer locales in the U.S. offer a relatively unobstructed view of the richness found in the night sky. I’m not just talking about spill-over light, but also the aerosols (small particles) floating in our atmosphere that our excess light bounces off of.

I imagine most of you have never seen a sky like what I’m talking about. Well, here is an amazing time-lapse that reveals what most of us don’t see but once could. Tell me you wouldn’t like to see a sky like that…or that you wouldn’t want your children and grandchildren to see a sky like that.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.