While not as breathtaking as the panoramic view of a truly dark sky, experiencing this "micro-structure" is also a mind-expanding experience: The sky is no longer a set of random point sources. Its a organic "thing" enclosing other "things".
Not sure what they thought of it, but I think it's telling how aware they were of the night sky as an active environment, e.g. the movements of the planets, and the relationships between events in the sky and our seasons (even though the their explanatory models were wrong).
On a clear night - especially in winter - before the invention of fire, it's all you'd be aware of. No wonder that they made patterns (constellations) of the brighter stars.
Astronomical observations are in a sense simpler and cleaner (and until the invention of accurate timepieces, compasses etc.) also of extreme practical use.
The reason is likely that our normal down-to-Earth environment is too complex and chaotic to be parsed. Observation of nearby processes gets things wrong because of overlapping effects. E.g. Aristotle thought that the natural state is for things to stop moving when they stop being pushed by a force. This is only the case because down here friction is dominant.
> have to go far out of my way and pay a lot of money
it should not be like this. A lot of light pollution is due to just not giving a damn about side-effects.
Definitely not on a hill over this but it’s just been a thought I’ve wrestled with at some point. I’m sure it’s not even original at all.
But if you just want to get somewhere on top of a mountain with no light pollution, you don't have to spend very much money, unless you happen to live in an area of the world with no mountains.
the cost of a clear night sky does not have to be "no technology". We don't need nearly as many streetlights, lighted signs, houselights, etc as we have.
I've lived in areas where regulation restricts lighting choices; it is a good thing.
Excess lighting is called light pollution, and it is a societal choice to put up with it. Society can choose otherwise and help us rediscover our wonder at the world.
Like I got to see the Milky Way up in the Porcupine Mountains a couple of years ago in Northern Michigan, off the shore of Lake Superior, while my wife was hunting for Yooperlites (rocks that glow under a UV light) on the beach late at night. Other than an 8 hour drive's worth of gas and a fairly inexpensive AirBnb it didn't cost anything extra to see it.
And you can always move to one of these places, too, and see it all the time. Solidly middle class homes up there can be had for about $200k in small towns/cities, then you only need to drive about 15 minutes to get out of town to see it.
And if you're in the western US, it looks like there's a lot more options. Much darker in general out there outside the major cities.
I do miss when you could see these things just outside of town in Illinois though. Used to drive just a bit outside of town and park on the side of a rural road and just look up and see it, when I was a kid/teen. There's almost no place in Illinois where you can see the Milky Way nowadays (and where I live now it's gray-white on the map, so I only see a few pin points in the sky right now, it's terrible).
White Sands National Monument in New Mexico has incredible views of the stars.
I saw beautiful stars canoeing on a lake in the Adirondack mountains.
I once saw comet Hyakutake by accident when I was riding in the back of a van on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I think it was around the Fort Littleton exit.
I suppose it depends on your starting point how expensive it is to see the stars. However, I agree that there is just too much artificial light. I get that we feel much safer and less bored, but there's something lost by not having the easy access to the night sky.
The problem is a clear night tends to be rare, and in winter when it’s 5C outside.
I don't know why anyone would even mention the sunrise considering how incredible that night sky was. The experience was similar to seeing the grand canyon: too big, beautiful, and intricate for my brain to take it all in. It was absolutely breathtaking. Also, absurdly cold (we were well prepared and it was still not enough)
The sunrise was fine. Very pretty, to be sure. But the main event was that night sky, for which I would have shown up a few hours earlier than I did had I known about it.
My best was at about 3500m in Peru, in the wee hours after fleeing my tent to be sick. Absolutely mind blowing to see the whole milky way like that.
I mostly just think it's weird that nobody even _mentions_ the transcendent night sky you might happen upon during a new moon or moonless part of the night.
Galileo was immediately astonished by this when he made his first telescope and instantly saw the complexity of things up in the sky.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46036/pg46036-images.ht...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26664/is-it-poss...
We would be a more inward focused civilization, and lesser for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...
> Krikkiters
> This race of quiet, polite, charming and rather whimsical humanoids caused the most devastating war in the history of the Galaxy (with over two "grillion" casualties). Their homeworld, Krikkit, is surrounded by a black cloud, so they had no knowledge of the universe outside their world. When a spaceship crashed on the surface of Krikkit, the inhabitants quickly stripped it of its secrets and used them to create their own "flimsy piece of near-junk" craft, Krikkit One. Upon reaching the outer edge of the dust cloud and seeing the galaxy for the first time, the people of Krikkit marveled at its beauty before being gripped with fear of it and casually deciding to destroy it, famously remarking "It'll have to go." The Earth game of cricket is a racial memory of the events of the Krikkit Wars.
via https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_races_and_specie...
Not just no light pollution, but much less atmosphere too! There aren't words available to describe how incredible it was.
we would all be better off with fewer lights on buildings, and fewer streetlights. there is no reason for most of them, and the cost is existentially incredible.
Yes there is, it's crime. Street lights deter crime.
Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
I love to see the night sky as well, but I don't want to pretend there aren't extremely good reasons for street lighting, and those reasons aren't going away.
That being said, are there ways to reduce outdoor lighting of giant industrial parking lots, of stadiums at 3 am, or whole floors of skyscrapers when 99% of people have gone home? Sure. But at the same time, reducing nighttime lighting by 50% isn't really going to make any difference in sky visibility. It's more about not wasting electricity.
I'm talking mostly about urban areas though -- in rural areas where there's already a decent amount of visibility and the population is small enough that most roads already don't have street lights, then regulation can actually make a difference, e.g. banning always-on floodlights on people's driveways.
On the good side of the spectrum, I've never experienced a city as dark as Tokyo at night, which is also one of the safest on both accounts...
So you're blaming victims for being mugged -- or worse? Because they weren't "prudent" enough?
Rather than realizing that dark areas create opportunities for criminals where they won't be recognized, or caught on camera, and where they can escape without people spotting them?
The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
Of course not, I am merely pointing the fact that the feeling of safety may not be actual safety. Changing the environment alters the behaviour of criminals and potential victims.
You also ignored that in the same sentence I blamed perpetrators: imprudent drivers.
> The lower rates of crime in Japan are due to cultural factors. And lighting doesn't change cultural factors.
That's basically where I was going with this.
As if the Japanese had always been tidy, the Dutch always fervent cyclists, the Italians smug about their food quality, etc. Culture shifts.
Kinda, sometimes. But this field is also fraught with tons of "bad implementations of a good idea", making the problem worse, as well as intuitions that don't hold up to empirical studies.
Classic example is a neighborhood adds extra bright streetlamps and neighbors install extra-bright flood lights on their garages. This illuminates some areas, but the areas that are missed become even "darker" because the extra light in people's eyes ruins night vision. Hiding in the bushes with your black thieving skimask (or along the fence line, or just off the road) becomes even more effective, and everyone else just gets a bright streetlight shining into their bedroom window all night long.
There's a whole subculture of designers talking about what makes effective street lighting, but it basically comes down to less blue light aimed more downwards.
And the best crime deterrent is having a lively neighborhood with more eyes on the street in the Jacobs-ey fashion. I heard of one crime study that considered lighting and cameras and all those things but found the best predictor of low crime rates was how many dogs lived in the neighborhood (and therefore people outside walking their dogs).
What we have is a situation where our city, state and federal governments know jack shit about the science behind proper lighting or why it's so important for both people and wildlife to get high-quality, whole-spectrum, 10-25KHz+ PWM lighting.
And contractors take advantage of this, charging exorbitant amounts of money for intentionally sub-par lighting systems. It's a crime against both nature and humanity.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-streetlights-are-giving-neighb...
Considering the context of crime prevention, it is rather ironic therefore that police stations traditionally have none other than blue lamps above their doors!
I don't want to walk in dark even if there is literally no other person.
I completely agree. But, it's very rarely a full moon.
When there's no moon at all, which is literally half the time, you might be surprised at how pitch black it is at night. Or just, you know, when there's heavy clouds.
Lighting affects property crime more than violent crime. It also depends on where the lights are, both in terms of neighborhood[1] and country[2].
On the other hand, lights dramatically affect how safe people feel[3] in an area, even if that feeling is not necessarily based on actual danger.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.3386/W25798
> Also simply driving safety. Driving with just headlights causes more accidents than on a well-lit street, since visibility is so much worse.
Accepting your points for convenience, wouldn't we get the same benefits with lights that only pointed downward? And if you further restrict to warmer colors (which interfere less with low-light sensitivity, also less diffraction reducing light pollution), with a sensible but low max intensity (again keeping the human eye more dark-sensitive, allowing better visibility into the non-illuminated spaces)?
Reducing nighttime lighting by 50% would make a huge difference in sky visibility.
I don't know if an IR emmitter would be reasonable, but that could augment the headlights to provide some really good visibility even without street lights.
Some of these things won't be gone for generations or more, whereas you can turn lights off pretty easily. Ideally we'll swap out the older designs of streetlights and such as better designs become prevalent and there's economic incentives to do so.
Some light pollution is unfortunate but it’s essentially trivial in comparison. It causes no long term damage and doesn’t really do anything but make the sky less interesting.
It's a small Island, only accessible by boat. One summer evening I went for a walk along the beach with my partner and we stood there in the clear night - with no light pollution, with the whole milky way above us. There were thousands and thousands of stars I had never seen before in a giant array that stretched across the whole sky. Subtle colours and brightness differences gave the milky way a structure and randomness at the same time, it was an incredibly beautiful and humbling experience, and changed my perspective of the universe too.
Growing up, I never even thought that people would not know what it's like; it was always just a part of my life.
Now I live in a city...it sucks...
One moonless night I walked outside and looked up and my jaw dropped at how startlingly bright the sky was with stars. It was like a long-exposure photograph but in the highest resolution my eyes could see.
I've been in the Namib desert in Namibia around the Orange river at night, although not during winter. There are loads of stars, but it's not colourful like the pictures and people will be underwhelmed if they have that expectation.
I took a group of people who had only lived in cities into the countryside to watch a meteor shower. It was fun seeing their minds blown when there were more than like 10 stars.
One thing I can't believe not everyone has seen is Andromeda. What's more is it doesn't even seem to be common knowledge that you can see it.
If you're in the southern hemisphere the coalsack nebula is cool although a bit scary.