Stars Unknown to Many

What was that eerie cloud?

Unfortunately, because of the tremendous increase in light pollution over the past quarter century, the majority of our current generation have never seen the night sky in all its grandeur.

In his book "Nightwatch," the well-known Canadian astronomer Terrence Dickinson comments that in the aftermath of the predawn 1994 Northridge, California earthquake, electrical power was knocked out over a wide area. Tens of thousands of people in southern California rushed out of their homes looked up and perhaps for the first time in their lives saw a dark, starry sky. In the days and weeks that followed, radio stations and observatories in the Los Angeles area received countless numbers of phone calls from concerned people who wondered whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of an eerie silvery cloud (the Milky Way) might have caused the quake.

"Such reaction," notes Dickinson, "can come only from people who have never seen the night sky away from city lights."

"If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson

If there were men who had always lived underground in fine and well-lit houses which had been adorned with statues and paintings, and equipped with all the things which those who are considered well-to-do possess in abundance, who had, however, never come forth into the upper world, but had learned by fame and hearsay of the existence of certain divine powers and natures, and had then at some time, through the jaws of the earth being opened, been able to come forth from those hidden regions, and to pass into these parts which we inhabit, when they had suddenly obtained a sight of the land and seas and sky, and had marked the vastness of the clouds, and the force of the winds, and had beheld the sun, and had marked not only its size and beauty, but also its power, since by diffusing light over the whole sky it caused day, and when, again, after night had overshadowed the earth, they then perceived the whole sky studded and adorned with stars, and the change in the light of the moon as it alternately waxed and waned, and the rising and setting of all these bodies, and the fixity and unchangeableness of their courses through all eternity, when they saw those things, they would assuredly believe both that the gods existed and that these mighty works proceeded from them.

-Cicero, quoting Aristotle, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.95...

...Are we with our light pollution like those people living underground?

See all my Dark Sky posts here.