How to Hide a Galaxy
It’s surprisingly easy to hide a galaxy with streetlights. It doesn’t sound all that special that you can’t see the Milky Way from the middle of a city street at night. But, honestly, why should that be a thing?
Angel Lopez-Sanchez, our guest on Not What You Think this week, thinks it shouldn’t be.
For most of human history’s clear nights it’s been enough to simply go outside, look up and see the grey glow of our home galaxy filling the sky. And, I mean filling.
As a life-long city-dweller, I really don’t know what that sort of a sky should look like. But I’m pretty sure it should be amazing.
Exactly. Something like that.
There’s a lot less Milky Way than there used to be. It’s disappearing. Which is to say: all the stars are still there, it’s just that we’re having more and more trouble seeing them.
Light from our cities is drowning out our skies.
This is actually less of a thing in Australia. In Europe, there’s no place where you can really see get a dark night sky. Not just in the cities, but all over the countryside as well.
Here, for now, even in the cities you can get a surprisingly good view, considering. But even though only 1.1% of Australian territory is light contaminated, 88% of people here live with high light pollution. A lot of us live inside that 1.1%.
So we’re doing better than a lot of places, for now. But what we’re not doing so much is having moments like this:
And we should. The sky should be glowing with stars, not just from our street lamps.
A city is never likely to have as clear and bright a star field as Angel’s highway to Parkes, but we can still do a lot better than we’re doing.
Don’t take my word for it. Click through to our show page and let him convince you.
Not What You Think is broadcast 10:30am Saturdays in September and October, on Sydney’s FBi Radio. Listen live on 94.5 FM or the website, or subscribe to the podcast via our show page.
