Show me the darkness

This is a hobby astronomer ranting.

As a young boy, I spent many nights on the terrace, lying flat on my back, gazing at the stars. Astronomy was a great hobby then. You could see a 100 stars with your naked eye, 10,000 with binoculars, and a million with an 8-inch reflector. And the moon, phew! You could touch it.

These ventures into the depth of space were lyrical, endless. The sheer scale forced you to put yourself and your precious little Earth in perspective. Seeing the universe this way calmed you, consumed you …until, dang! The neighbors fitted a bright floodlight on their terrace.

But worse things were to come.

The next year, a group of apartment blocks sprang up on the street to the north. Two years later, a tall apartment came up right across the road.

There went the dance of Cassiopeia, the two Ursas and other mythical characters around the North Star. No more Mercury spotting in the wee hours. No more glimpses of rising Venus.

The west was still open. So you could catch a rare glimpse of Mercury sneaking across the disc of the setting Sun (a tricky, but astounding moment for an amateur astronomer). The southern skies still afforded wonderful views of the brilliant pair of Alpha and Beta Centauri. But being situated above the equator meant that the southern sky parade was just above the city lights.

Effectively, straight up was the only window to the universe. But the neighbor’s floodlight washed that out too!

That was the end of my neighborhood stargazing club. The incident kindled in me a lifelong hatred for light. I was 14 then.

Today, 35 years later, cities have only become brighter, noisier, and smokier. People bluster about noise and smoke pollution. Light pollution is worse. Have you rushed outside when the lights go out in the area? There is a certain calm; eerie, only because we have grown unfamiliar with it.

All around us and all around the year, living spaces are awash in artificial light, inside and outside. Getting rid of darkness everywhere is a mindless waste of energy, and if you care, harmful to nocturnal life. There are lights everywhere — from brightly lit malls to mansions, streets full of daylight lamps, right down to the insides of refrigerators in brightly lit homes. I even have a light inside the glove compartment of my car, damn it!

Where has all the darkness gone? Darkness lets us see what is beyond, what is far away. Years ago, we could navigate confidently in the dark. Now we are lost in the glare. We are blinded without darkness.

In the countryside or when you are up in the hills, in those moments, when the night sky reveals herself, it takes your breath away; it makes you gurgle like a child. You’re blown away by the amazing spectacle the stars present under a truly dark sky. As Paul Bogard says, there is a primal, fundamental necessity for darkness.

There is a certain loss that comes with the absence of darkness.

In“The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light” Bogard writes that 80% of American children have never seen the Milky Way.

That really is a tragedy.

And this really is a book review. Grab that book. (You can’t read it in the dark though.)

Catch something about me here.