The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it
The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it
'Noctalgia' is a feature of the modern age.
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.
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Try in a small town. Seriously, tho villages are better. Go in the backroads, you'll have plenty of sky and stars to get lost in.
You'd be surprised how much "bleeding" there is. You also can't scope in certain directions because of even really far off cities. You're often forced into a specific cone.
Perfection is the enemy of "good-enough and be able to experience in this lifetime"
Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.
People need to stop getting hung up on the idea that it will never be as good, like ok, what can you do about it then? Its quite nihilistic if you ask me and I remember it being more than good enough to enchant me when I lived in an area that was relatively absent of this problem when you went out to the backroads
I think it's quite nihilistic to just accept that there's no going back to a better night sky as if too many lights being kept on a night is an insurmountable problem.
I've reached the same conclusion regarding how pointless the discussion is as long as the tenor of it remains "paradise lost". I've been enchanted by what I've seen in a smaller place in the backroads, people need to get out more.
The article is about how there's less of it over time. Areas that were once nice (ex. Great views over the water or over a nice field) no longer work because of nearby light pollution.
There are few places left on Earth to see an unpolluted night sky. Definitely nowhere near civilization. On top of that, light pollution still drowns out dimmer objects permanently. We are blinding ourselves globally. To our ancestors the sky was a living light show. Its no mystery why they thought gods lived there.
In densely populated areas you have to move quite far out to find such places. Like, check a light pollution map and then scroll into central Europe, like around the Netherlands and western Germany. It's all just a big red blob.