Topical Guide 580
Mark Dorset
Nature: Wonders of: The Night sky
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 7:
When she finished the roll, she asked, suddenly, without any introductory signal that we were shifting from the familiar to the treacherous, “Have you ever looked at the night sky?” She looked at her class list. “Patti?”
“Oh, sure. Yeah.” This was comforting. We were all relieved. Looking at the night sky wasn’t hard. It was something we’d already done. If general science was going to be on this level, we might make it through.
“How many stars do you see?” Miss Rheingold asked quickly.
“Noctalgia” is a feature of the modern age.
Humanity is slowly losing access to the night sky, and astronomers have invented a new term to describe the pain associated with this loss: “noctalgia,” meaning “sky grief.” [Note from MD: This doesn’t seem correct to me. I think the neologism noctalgia must have been formed from the Latin nox, noct- “night” and algos “pain,” on the analogy of nostalgia, with a meaning something more along the lines of “a painful longing for the nights of old, when we could see stars.”]
Along with our propensity for polluting air and water and the massive amounts of carbon we’re dumping into the atmosphere to trigger climate change, we have created another kind of pollution: light pollution.
Most of our light pollution comes from sources on the ground. While humans have had campfires and handheld lanterns for ages, the amount of light we produce through electricity is astounding. We light up our office buildings, streets, parking lots and homes. Of course, some of this lighting is needed for safety and security, but much of it goes to waste. Plus, until we became more aware of light pollution, we tended to allow lighting to spill in every direction, both toward the areas we were trying to illuminate and straight up into the night sky. […]
Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them. […]
The loss of the night sky has several tangible and cultural impacts. We are losing a rich tradition of human cultural knowledge; cultures around the world and throughout history have used the sky as a springboard for the imagination, painting heroes, monsters and myths in the constellations. Nowadays, city dwellers are lucky to see even the brightest stars in the sky, let alone the faintest sketch of a familiar constellation.
See also:
Nature: Mysteries of, Beauties of, Misperceptions of TG 60
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