Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to 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.
It varies depending on what country your in, but I don’t think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you’re in the US unless you’re in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.
And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn’t great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I’d say that’s a worthy trade off.
Like a life saving drug with side effects, there’s always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it’s important we don’t act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.
The part that wasn’t in the title:
astronomers have invented a new term to describe the pain associated with this loss: “noctalgia,” meaning “sky grief.”
I feel this.
Srsly, a few weeks ago, I though to take walk at 2 AM, and TF. The sky was literally bright as it was 6PM. Ruined the entire feel for me.
In my parents farm the night sky is perfectly visible. They live far from any town and there are no lights you can’t just turn off so sometimes I just look at the sky when I’m visiting.
Plenty of places like this still in my country thankfully.
I’ve always lived in cities and didn’t see the milky way until I was in my 30s.
Anyhow, I took my kid camping last weekend and she couldn’t believe how many stars there were. We were both enjoying it but then the string of SpaceX satellites went by and kind of ruined the moment
We were just up in the mountains last weekend, it was by far the best stargazing I have ever experienced in my 40 years. I could see the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.
Anyway, I counted over 15 satellites during the 2 hours we were outside, as well as 2 very bright meteors. Plus we saw the international space station and an iridium flare.
I laughed at that last part. I am sorry that happened to you but it is pretty funny.
