Our Night Sky Is Disappearing

When we lived in New York City we did not think much about the night sky. Maybe, if we were near Central Park, we could get some idea of the night sky, but you were warned not to go through the park late at night. Walking through the city there are streetlamps everywhere and cars with bright lights.

When we moved to Santa Fe we marveled at the skies day & night, but after some years we realized we could enjoy the clouds during the day, but our night sky was disappearing very slowly but surely. We are destroying our enjoyment of the night sky. You don’t realize it at first, but it starts in your bedroom. The electric clock shines the TV or console or charging devise have a little colored light on them. It is however outdoor lights that are the issue.

We live on an arroyo where there are no streetlights but the Park Service, of all places, has bright lights over their parking lot long after office hours, presumably for security, if nothing else. There is also a glow from downtown Santa Fe but a much more wide-spread glow from Albuquerque 60 miles away. We have all read about the drones over New Jersey. No one knows what they are, but they give off light from time to time.

The Washington Post recently published an editorial on the subject of light pollution. It brought up something I had never thought about, astronomers are having a hard time finding places where night skies are dark enough to have effective observatories. Even in suitable locations, satellites can reflect the sun even after night fall and commercial communications satellites are multiplying.

The article goes on to say that the sky has grown brighter by 10% annually over the last 10 years which means that a child born a decade ago by the time they are off to college will be able to see 2 to 3 times fewer stars from earth. The number of stars we can see at night become diminished by at least 45% which is the lowest percentage I found.

Artists have been interested in the night sky for thousands of years and we have examples over centuries. One of the artists I particularly admire is Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610). This is his painting of the “Flight into Egypt” from the year before his death. You will find the painting today in Munich at the Alte Pinakothek.

Though our first thought of a painting with stars in a night sky might be “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh at MOMA, but a better example might be his “Starry Night Over the Rhone”, 1888, in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris‎. Here you can even see how the light from the houses can take away from the view of the stars so van Gogh accentuates the stars as brighter.

The other night I was looking at the full moon with the clouds. I didn’t catch the image with my camera, but art historian Antonia Bostrom did, and posted it on Facebook. Now is the photographer creating art or am I simply taken by the beauty of the subject? Well, I would not discard the photograph because it does remind us of the beauty we saw but it is not the original.

It also reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting in the Metropolitan Museum of “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (1825-1830) which so effectively conveys the experience.

Maybe the best place to see a pure night sky is at sea and it is dramatically captured by J.M.W. Turner’s “Fishermen at Sea” (1796) in the Tate, London. In our technological age we forget that stars were essential guides to navigation on the ocean.

Death Valley in California is rated as one the best places on terra firma for star gazing. Far enough from the urban centers and their light pollution, it is debatedly as close as a mortal will get in the U.S. to a total view of the night sky. You might spend a night, but you can’t settle there!