From "The Dark Side"
by David Owen
The New Yorker, 20 August 2007
"In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had made of the skies above Padua. His homemade telescope had less magnifying and resolving power than most beginners' telescopes sold today, yet with them he made astonishing discoveries: that the moon has mountains and other topographical features; that Jupiter is orbited by satellites, which he called planets; and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars....Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name."
"The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow."
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"My friend Ken Daniel is a lighting designer....His wife, Gina, told me that the street lights and other lights in their neighborhood [in Glendale, CA] were so bright that their bedrooms never got fully dark at night, even though they had curtains. When the Northridge earthquake struck, in 1994, the first thing she noticed, after the shaking had awakened her, was that she couldn't see. "The earthquake had knocked out power all over the city, and everything was black," she said. "When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbors standing in the street, looking up at the sky and saying, 'Wow'."
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"Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours "in a box, looking at a box," as Dave Crawford [astronomer and president of the International Dark-Sky Association] put it: we spend our days inside offices, looking at computer screens, and our evenings inside houses, looking at television screens. Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles--and when we do venture outdoors after dark we are usually stepping into yet another box, the glowing canopy that our lights have projected into the sky."
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