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.
There was a NASA lady on StarTalk recently talking about how there’s something like 360,000 more satellites planned/approved to go into orbit and it’s going to completely erase the night sky. We’re at something like 7700 currently.
We are slowly turning ourselves into Krikkit.
Soon as we invented the little green piece of paper it was all downhill from there
Should never have gotten down from the trees
If you have seen that StarTalk episode, do you remember what Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s response to that? He seems like good people…
I don’t recall offhand his response but I believe it was this episode: https://startalkmedia.com/show/the-story-of-space-imaging-with-carolyn-madam-saturn-porco/
What was it?
Reminds me of how we sometimes export light pollution. When I first got to Afghanistan I thought I would be able to see the stars being in the middle of a desert. That idea was quickly made harder to accomplish by the massive light pollution coming from camp leatherneck which, along with the moon dust perpetually floating mid air, killed any chance to see the stars clearly for miles around. Base turned a patch of desert into a sprawling light factory in just a few years.
I live in the darkest part of my town. When my porch light burned out, I decided to not replace it because sometimes I can see stars at night.
Why is every other website being bought by future inc and using that same layout
What a simple, great word to describe it.
Lived in the city for a few years before moving back to my rural hometown. The night sky without any light pollution was definitely an underrated thing I didn’t realize I missed.
Little reminder that your eyes need 30min to adjust to night conditions, and just a second of light to start the counter again. So no smartphones, no watch, no kindle, not even a lighter or the led on your vape, if you want to enjoy the experience fully.
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.”
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.
Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.
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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.
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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.
