The afternoon window opened. As the sky turned a deep blue, stars began to appear over Utah’s Hovenweep National Monument, one of the world’s first dark-sky parks. As a campfire crackled in me, the Milky Way came into view to the southwest next to the tranquil silhouette of Sleeping Ute Mountain.
I’m under the darkest sky I’ve ever experienced. It took me a week to get here, after traveling thousands of miles in planes and vehicles. Given that 99% of people in North America and Europe live under light-polluted skies — six hundred million more people — my quest to stargaze under dark skies put me in the most sensible 1%.
The problem, of course, is the immediate one of slight contamination.
Are dark skies now a luxury for those who can travel?Yes, and it’s an unfortunate state of affairs. ” Darkness will not be just another hotspot for the elite, for those who can fly to locate darkness in remote places,” writes Dani Robertson in All Through the Night: Why Our Lives Depend on Dark Skies ($29. 99, hardcover/audiobook on Audible). His interesting new book highlights the problem of light pollution. “The evening sky is for everyone, all beings, all things,” Robertson writes. “Where is the rage that opposes the death of the evening?
There’s a lot of anger in the prose of the Robertson. Su paragraph of a prominent word by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in his “Don’t input softly into this night” is not a cultural coincidence. Known as @DaniDarkSkies on social media, Robertson works as a Dark Sky Officer (yes, they exist!) for the NOS mission in North Wales, arguably the darkest region in the UK.
One might think that the mere fact that his paintings, which protect the vast Eryri Dark Sky Reserve (the Snowdonia National Park, as well as the AONBs of the Isle of Anglesey, the Clwydian Range and the Dee Valley and the Peninsula of Llŷn), be a recognition. that soft contaminants are a problem. But the protective islands of darkness are a rearguard action, precisely because the soft pollutants are getting worse. Man-made pollutants have increased by at least 49% globally in the last 25 years alone, according to a recent study. Astronomers and stargazers We can watch the evening sky disappear in real time.
Robertson’s book is a much-needed call to arms at a time when high energy costs are a major political issue, at a time when more and more energy protection accessories are being unnecessarily left on. Why are humans so obsessed with light? suffocated,” he writes, comparing excess synthetic light to a pollutant that humanity ignores. “It can be controlled without problems, but it has been allowed to work its way over everything, enveloping everyone, suppressing the senses and suffocating the lives of people. living beings below. “
Look at the evening sky from any city and see a perpetual twilight that is absolutely general and yet absolutely unnatural.
The challenge is the advent of reasonable LED lighting, which has allowed the proliferation of clear, white, poorly installed security luminaires, which transport the suburbs of cities. On the other hand, friendly neighbors, those who conscientiously recycle and communicate about how to reduce theft and car trips, do not hesitate to install new unshielded motion-sensing LED lighting fixtures in their homes, leaving curtains and blinds open at night.
The most attractive thing is that the arrival of LED lighting deserves to mean the death of light pollution. They can be easily protected, mitigated, timed and controlled. That’s why Robertson is angry: we already have the solution to light pollution, but still society can’t be bothered to do anything.
LED safety luminaires are too bright, leading to glare and excessive light pollution.
Fear of the dark is, argues Robertson, one of the reasons why it’s challenging to get people to switch off, or even reduce the brightness, of all kinds of lights—including, perhaps most importantly, streetlights in urban areas. “This fear is intrinsically human,” she writes, from experience. “But for too long, darkness has been wrongly blamed for societal issues and used as a symbol for all things evil.”
His argument is based on the fact that it is not the darkness that terrifies people; It is male violence. A colorful description of a Friday night in the Welsh valleys demonstrates that a curfew for men would be more effective than advising women to stay home after dark.
Laced with lyrical anger, All Through The Night is also an entertaining primer on humanity’s relationship with the night, including the night sky. One of the most fun chapters examines the history of stargazing. It begins with an account of witnessing a total solar eclipse in 1999—complete with a very British tale of pointlessly fiddling with eclipse glasses while thick clouds blocked the view—from beside a neolithic burial chamber.
Robertson tells us about the growing popularity of astronomy during Covid-19 and works backwards, through Lemaître’s theories on the origin of the universe through Isaac Newton, Chinese astronomy, Native American petroglyphs, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Neolithic sites. United Kingdom, Ireland, Turkey and Germany. ” From day one, we’ve aimed for the stars and beyond,” Robertson writes. Will we continue to wonder where the next adventure will take us if we can’t see the stars?
That astronomers are dreamers is a compelling argument. We’ve found someone who complains that we’re “wasting money” on space exploration and moon landings, and we’ve also discovered someone who never looks at the stars.
Light pollutants want their moment. Eventually, it may be the next plastic in the oceans or noise pollutants (whichever is accepted by society), but for now, it’s just a niche spin-off of the crusade to reduce carbon emissions. After all, any mild pollutant is immediate evidence of wasted energy. The fact that Dark Sky parks are thriving, as well as the first Dark Sky Resort in 2023, is wonderful news, but on their own they will create dark night skies only for the travel-able elite and rural dwellers. Want more articles on the “best places for stargazing?”Unless the search for dark skies is a movement in urban areas, the night is doomed to fail.
The night sky is a playground for science and humanity, and offers a rich vein for writers, but most books on the subject lack emotion. Not so All Through The Night, a highly original book that tackles this wonderful social challenge from unforeseen angles. He’s furious about the loss of the stars, but it was born out of a love of the night that Robertson desperately seeks to share. “I need you to fall in love with the night,” she writes. I need you to protect me and fight for him before he’s gone forever. “
Here are Robertson’s Dark Sky Friendly rules— it’s as easy as the flick of a switch:
I wish you clear skies and wide-open eyes.