31 ms·

I'm from the Netherlands, one of the most light-polluted areas on the planet and had my first proper dark night only in my 30s. It was in South Africa. We were

by fleddr 4y ago

I'm from the Netherlands, one of the most light-polluted areas on the planet and had my first proper dark night only in my 30s. It was in South Africa. We were driving with a roofed jeep on some plains in search of nocturnal wildlife. Then, the driver stopped and told us to get out. It was freezing and he prepared hot chocolate from the back of the car. He killed his search light and it got so dark that we could not see our own hands. And then we looked up. Holy shit. I'm not a melodramatic person but this was the first time in my life that I experienced living on a planet, connected to something far greater. I mean, I knew this to be the case, but I never experienced it. Because I normally live under the clouds and a yellow haze. I experienced it once more in Colombia where I could see the Milky Way with the naked eye. It's sad that an experience that should be a given has become so rare. I'm especially frustrated with all the lights that have no purpose. Nobody goes to admire the architecture of your church at 3AM at night. Nor do you have to decorate your backyard so excessively with obnoxious lights whilst you are sleeping.

maegul 4y ago
For me this is an argument in support of higher density living and against suburban sprawl. If the distance between the urban artificial environment and an undeveloped “natural” environment beyond the city can be minimised, then there’ll be more opportunities for people to experience things like the above. Maybe suburbs provide enough clarity of the night sky for most, I’m not sure. Still, the suburbs will never be the natural environment that undeveloped forests or parks could be.
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  If you want a low-light suburb, check out Irvine, CA on the eastside. Sometimes it's so dark at night, it's scary.
  - maegul 4y ago
    It’s curious the talk of low light suburbs. Not sure how I feel about them. My instinct is that they’re an anti pattern because of the safety concerns and I’m sure many would have the same thought, but I’m sure there’s more nuance to them than that and the sources of actual safety or danger one has in a suburb.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      Motion sensors tend to provide safety as well as reducing wasted lighting. Seems like a win-win, yet they're rarely used.
      - irjustin 4y ago
        I don't think this works well in terms of safety. If it's a low light area, it's beacon to your location. Only thing that would be worse is lights turning on headed in my direction! Even if it was a simple car headed down the street, I'd be nothing but paranoid. Great stuff for horror movies though.
        giantg2 4y ago
        It's a beacon to others' location as well. When a light at my house turns on, I know someone is there.
        kupopuffs 4y ago
        we should not live in total darkness neither. when the lights are on, EVERYONE'S exposed. No hiding.
- aikinai 4y ago
  I don’t remember the name but I read a book years ago that was set in a future where humans live in dense cities with everything in between returned to wilderness. I always thought it was a really compelling idea if it were possible.
  - maegul 4y ago
    I've recently spent some time moving around the rural areas around my city and been really bothered by just how flat agriculture has made so much of the land. Sure there are preserved parks and even areas with some form of forest mingled with residential properties. But the sheer amount of "flattening" and deforestation I "saw" (as it is easy to not notice it if you consider agricultural land normal) built up to a really unpalatable and disturbing feeling. It was the first time I felt like I had some rational belief that the human population really should be reduced. Without some wonderful energy source that can provide a worthwhile substitute for sunlight, food production is necessarily limited to the top 0.2-1.5m of land (right?). From aesthetic to environmental factors, it really seems like an awful thing to reduce so much of the fertile lands to just that.
    - aikinai 4y ago
      This is actually something that’s nice about Japan. The geography somewhat forces this sort of land use with urban areas and agriculture limited to the flat regions between the mountains. It’s clearly not an intentional choice since Japanese development policies will trample over anything feasible, but the mountains effectively protect themselves for the most part.
  - sharatvir 4y ago
    I put your comment into chatGPT verbatim and it came back with The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson. Any chance that’s the one? I’d be interested in reading it.
    - aikinai 4y ago
      I checked the summary and that’s definitely not it. It might have been a short story or essay? I read it in what was supposed to be something like an engineering ethics class I think, but the teacher was more interested in exploring green philosophies. I remember reading a lot of really interesting stories and essays and the ideas from this one stuck with me, but I’ve never been able to find the writing again. My memory is too hazy and I only retained the general idea.
- giantg2 4y ago
  You'd still have to drive quite a way out of the cities in most places, suburbs or not. The sky glow is noticeable for miles in places with any humidity.
- citrin_ru 4y ago
  Dense cities tends to be much brighter than suburbs. I’ve lived on a street with bright LED streetlights and even with blinds down bedrooms was uncomfortably bright at night affecting quality of sleep. Now I live in a place resembling American suburbs and enjoy relatively darkness at night.
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
That's why they call it "sleeping out under the stars." You can see the structure of the Milky Way sometimes. Even satellites and planes look like absurd neon signs out in the country.
- culi 4y ago
  Every now and then someone posts a photograph of the milkyway galaxy with all its colors and glories during a new moon. It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure. In reality if you manage to get to one of the few places left on earth that are truly dark sky places and you catch it during a new moon, the spectacular lights are really not that far off Unfortunately the vast majority of internet denizens today have never truly experienced a dark sky during a new moon. An experience that just 200 years ago almost every human has had
  - davidcuddeback 4y ago
    > It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure. Why? That's actually true. I've been to many truly dark sky sites. I get out to one at least once a year on average. I've photographed the Milky Way, galaxies, nebulae, you name it. Under dark skies, the milky way is an amazing site. But don't be mistaken: it's still gray in appearance to the naked eye. Let's look at this in a few different ways: 1) The pupil of the human eye opens to about 7mm (if you're young) under truly dark skies. That is the limiting aperture that determines how many photons strike the retina. The human visual system is optimized to detect motion. The integration time for the image you see in your brain is maybe 1/30th of a second. When I photograph the Milky Way, I use a 14mm f/1.8 lens (that's a 14mm/1.8=7.8mm aperture) with about a 30 second exposure. Those two factors alone put the camera at a (7.8/7)^2 * 30/(1/30) = 1111x higher exposure level. The camera also has ISO levels for further gain. 2) The human eye has two types of receptors: cones and rods. Cones are used for color vision. Rods are used for low light vision. It takes more photons to stimulate a cone than it does a rod. So when you're looking at faint objects, you might not be able to discern their color. The reason people like me seek out dark skies is because the objects we're trying to see are at the limits of detectability and we'll take whatever advantage we can get. Even when viewing through my 4-inch telescope, most objects appear gray. And that's with a (106/7)^2 = 229x light gathering advantage over the naked eye. 3) Have you ever thought about why it's called the Milky Way? It comes from the name given to it by the ancient Greeks. It appeared to them as a streak of milk in the sky (and they didn't have modern light pollution issues). What color is milk?
similarmemoryz 4y ago
I had a similar experience while in the Withsunday Islands for a 3 day sail of the coast of Australia. It was awesome.
michaelteter 4y ago
I had this same experience when I moved from metropolitan Texas to a high altitude location in the mountains of Colorado. I would take my dog for a walk at 2am and just get stuck staring upward. The first couple of nights, I was amazed at what I could see, but then I was a bit annoyed about this one strip of clouds that was blocking part of my view across the entire sky. The next night I realized it wasn't a cloud :). "My God, it's full of stars." Portugal is relatively close to NL, and it has some spectacular sky viewing which isn't too remote from villages or places to stay.
giantg2 4y ago
Motion sensors are cheap these days, but for some reason they're still so uncommon. To me, this would be one of the easiest wins. Even if 25% of the lights were tripped at any given time, that would still be a 75% reduction from those residential outdoor lights.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Someone posted here the other day that he lived in an area ranking high on the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale Must be quite something. I live in a civilized country but 45 minutes from the closest highway and far from any city, so I get to enjoy beautiful night skies. But satellites are already polluting it : ( Also, dumb question but: can't satellites be made to not emit any light and to not reflect it?
- YourDadVPN 4y ago
  I remember that when the Starlink satellites first went up and people complained they were too visible, Starlink agreed to make future ones less so. I don't know why they didn't do that to begin with, maybe the metal is shiny by default and it's an extra cost to make it matte? Maybe it's about heat, since a matte object will absorb more from light? At any rate we're in dire need of some regulation around satellite visibility before we lose more of our night sky... oh, and flying drone billboards need to be banned before they catch on.
ChatGTP 4y ago
"Nothing to see here, please go back to looking at your Instagram explore feed" \s I know what you mean, I once spent a week in the Australian outback, in a desert which is considered one of the darkest place on earth. The sky looked luminescent, I can't describe how insane it looked, it was almost totally purple and I could actually see things moving around, satellites, the space station, meteors, I could clearly make out planets, it was absolutely unbelievable. I was sleeping in a "swag" and I could just lie there watching it for hours.
elevaet 4y ago
It's so ironic to have such incredible technology to peer deep into the cosmos, yet on a day-to-day basis we've never been more disconnected from the heavens.
xerxesaa 4y ago
I had a similar experience in Wadi Rum in Jordan. I'd recommend it to anyone.

by fleddr 4y ago

maegul 4y ago

For me this is an argument in support of higher density living and against suburban sprawl. If the distance between the urban artificial environment and an undeveloped “natural” environment beyond the city can be minimised, then there’ll be more opportunities for people to experience things like the above. Maybe suburbs provide enough clarity of the night sky for most, I’m not sure. Still, the suburbs will never be the natural environment that undeveloped forests or parks could be.

kupopuffs 4y ago
If you want a low-light suburb, check out Irvine, CA on the eastside. Sometimes it's so dark at night, it's scary.
- maegul 4y ago
  It’s curious the talk of low light suburbs. Not sure how I feel about them. My instinct is that they’re an anti pattern because of the safety concerns and I’m sure many would have the same thought, but I’m sure there’s more nuance to them than that and the sources of actual safety or danger one has in a suburb.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Motion sensors tend to provide safety as well as reducing wasted lighting. Seems like a win-win, yet they're rarely used.
    - irjustin 4y ago
      I don't think this works well in terms of safety. If it's a low light area, it's beacon to your location. Only thing that would be worse is lights turning on headed in my direction! Even if it was a simple car headed down the street, I'd be nothing but paranoid. Great stuff for horror movies though.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        It's a beacon to others' location as well. When a light at my house turns on, I know someone is there.
      - kupopuffs 4y ago
        we should not live in total darkness neither. when the lights are on, EVERYONE'S exposed. No hiding.
aikinai 4y ago
I don’t remember the name but I read a book years ago that was set in a future where humans live in dense cities with everything in between returned to wilderness. I always thought it was a really compelling idea if it were possible.
- maegul 4y ago
  I've recently spent some time moving around the rural areas around my city and been really bothered by just how flat agriculture has made so much of the land. Sure there are preserved parks and even areas with some form of forest mingled with residential properties. But the sheer amount of "flattening" and deforestation I "saw" (as it is easy to not notice it if you consider agricultural land normal) built up to a really unpalatable and disturbing feeling. It was the first time I felt like I had some rational belief that the human population really should be reduced. Without some wonderful energy source that can provide a worthwhile substitute for sunlight, food production is necessarily limited to the top 0.2-1.5m of land (right?). From aesthetic to environmental factors, it really seems like an awful thing to reduce so much of the fertile lands to just that.
  - aikinai 4y ago
    This is actually something that’s nice about Japan. The geography somewhat forces this sort of land use with urban areas and agriculture limited to the flat regions between the mountains. It’s clearly not an intentional choice since Japanese development policies will trample over anything feasible, but the mountains effectively protect themselves for the most part.
- sharatvir 4y ago
  I put your comment into chatGPT verbatim and it came back with The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson. Any chance that’s the one? I’d be interested in reading it.
  - aikinai 4y ago
    I checked the summary and that’s definitely not it. It might have been a short story or essay? I read it in what was supposed to be something like an engineering ethics class I think, but the teacher was more interested in exploring green philosophies. I remember reading a lot of really interesting stories and essays and the ideas from this one stuck with me, but I’ve never been able to find the writing again. My memory is too hazy and I only retained the general idea.
giantg2 4y ago
You'd still have to drive quite a way out of the cities in most places, suburbs or not. The sky glow is noticeable for miles in places with any humidity.
citrin_ru 4y ago
Dense cities tends to be much brighter than suburbs. I’ve lived on a street with bright LED streetlights and even with blinds down bedrooms was uncomfortably bright at night affecting quality of sleep. Now I live in a place resembling American suburbs and enjoy relatively darkness at night.

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

That's why they call it "sleeping out under the stars." You can see the structure of the Milky Way sometimes. Even satellites and planes look like absurd neon signs out in the country.

culi 4y ago
Every now and then someone posts a photograph of the milkyway galaxy with all its colors and glories during a new moon. It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure. In reality if you manage to get to one of the few places left on earth that are truly dark sky places and you catch it during a new moon, the spectacular lights are really not that far off Unfortunately the vast majority of internet denizens today have never truly experienced a dark sky during a new moon. An experience that just 200 years ago almost every human has had
- davidcuddeback 4y ago
  > It's really frustrating to see most of the top comments calling out that it only looks so pretty because of exposure. Why? That's actually true. I've been to many truly dark sky sites. I get out to one at least once a year on average. I've photographed the Milky Way, galaxies, nebulae, you name it. Under dark skies, the milky way is an amazing site. But don't be mistaken: it's still gray in appearance to the naked eye. Let's look at this in a few different ways: 1) The pupil of the human eye opens to about 7mm (if you're young) under truly dark skies. That is the limiting aperture that determines how many photons strike the retina. The human visual system is optimized to detect motion. The integration time for the image you see in your brain is maybe 1/30th of a second. When I photograph the Milky Way, I use a 14mm f/1.8 lens (that's a 14mm/1.8=7.8mm aperture) with about a 30 second exposure. Those two factors alone put the camera at a (7.8/7)^2 * 30/(1/30) = 1111x higher exposure level. The camera also has ISO levels for further gain. 2) The human eye has two types of receptors: cones and rods. Cones are used for color vision. Rods are used for low light vision. It takes more photons to stimulate a cone than it does a rod. So when you're looking at faint objects, you might not be able to discern their color. The reason people like me seek out dark skies is because the objects we're trying to see are at the limits of detectability and we'll take whatever advantage we can get. Even when viewing through my 4-inch telescope, most objects appear gray. And that's with a (106/7)^2 = 229x light gathering advantage over the naked eye. 3) Have you ever thought about why it's called the Milky Way? It comes from the name given to it by the ancient Greeks. It appeared to them as a streak of milk in the sky (and they didn't have modern light pollution issues). What color is milk?

similarmemoryz 4y ago

I had a similar experience while in the Withsunday Islands for a 3 day sail of the coast of Australia. It was awesome.

michaelteter 4y ago

I had this same experience when I moved from metropolitan Texas to a high altitude location in the mountains of Colorado. I would take my dog for a walk at 2am and just get stuck staring upward. The first couple of nights, I was amazed at what I could see, but then I was a bit annoyed about this one strip of clouds that was blocking part of my view across the entire sky. The next night I realized it wasn't a cloud :). "My God, it's full of stars." Portugal is relatively close to NL, and it has some spectacular sky viewing which isn't too remote from villages or places to stay.

giantg2 4y ago

Motion sensors are cheap these days, but for some reason they're still so uncommon. To me, this would be one of the easiest wins. Even if 25% of the lights were tripped at any given time, that would still be a 75% reduction from those residential outdoor lights.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Someone posted here the other day that he lived in an area ranking high on the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale Must be quite something. I live in a civilized country but 45 minutes from the closest highway and far from any city, so I get to enjoy beautiful night skies. But satellites are already polluting it : ( Also, dumb question but: can't satellites be made to not emit any light and to not reflect it?

YourDadVPN 4y ago
I remember that when the Starlink satellites first went up and people complained they were too visible, Starlink agreed to make future ones less so. I don't know why they didn't do that to begin with, maybe the metal is shiny by default and it's an extra cost to make it matte? Maybe it's about heat, since a matte object will absorb more from light? At any rate we're in dire need of some regulation around satellite visibility before we lose more of our night sky... oh, and flying drone billboards need to be banned before they catch on.

ChatGTP 4y ago

"Nothing to see here, please go back to looking at your Instagram explore feed" \s I know what you mean, I once spent a week in the Australian outback, in a desert which is considered one of the darkest place on earth. The sky looked luminescent, I can't describe how insane it looked, it was almost totally purple and I could actually see things moving around, satellites, the space station, meteors, I could clearly make out planets, it was absolutely unbelievable. I was sleeping in a "swag" and I could just lie there watching it for hours.

elevaet 4y ago

It's so ironic to have such incredible technology to peer deep into the cosmos, yet on a day-to-day basis we've never been more disconnected from the heavens.

xerxesaa 4y ago

I had a similar experience in Wadi Rum in Jordan. I'd recommend it to anyone.