Seeing Stars
An unpolluted view of the night sky
There are few places in the northeastern US where this is possible. You step outside after dark on a clear day and look up. It’s a galaxy up there. It looks like something out of a movie. It has to be CGI.
It’s not though. It’s something so simple it should be mundane. It’s only the night sky, but without light pollution.
Here in New Jersey, I’m situated between the major metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia. Light pollution is a given. But one year, my family took us on vacation out of state to a remote mountain town, and we had one perfectly clear night as we checked in. My parents had the wherewithal to tell us to look up. I’m so glad they did.
I haven’t truly seen the night sky since. Not like I did that evening. I am 100% sure I’ll cry when I see it again. Because it’s become so rare. All glitter and twinkle and stardust. The visible universe on display.
It has to be extremely dark to see the more distant stars. These are the numbers that make old literature make sense, like when the Bible juxtaposes the similes of stars in the sky and grains of sand on the shore. These seemed too dissimilar to me. There weren’t that many stars!
But there were. There are. They could see them better back then.
Seeing the stars helped nurture a deep love of nature and the outdoors. It’s a privilege to seek out the still-wild places of this planet and visit them. On every backpacking trip, I hope for clear skies, and peer up through the canopy of trees.
This website from DarkSky lets you search for places where the sky is dark enough to see it. I plan to use this to guide some future vacations and backpacking trips, because I can’t get that mental image out of my head, but I also can’t recall it with the clarity of something familiar. It’s time to revisit real darkness.
For further reading, here’s information from the IUCN about the problem of light pollution and what can be done to combat it.
If you have any power over the way your town or city chooses its lights, please look into fixtures and other measures that reduce light pollution. Imagine your hometown at night with that epic stellar backdrop. With the right changes, we can bring the galaxy back to more parts of the world. I promise, the view is more than worth the effort.
