I should have placed this post on Space, but since it includes a copy of my last published article (in this month's issue of a Florida publication), I felt copyright issues might have arisen if it appeared in a forum open to public view. (Besides, I want the masses to have to PAY to read it MUAHAHAHAHA!)

I'm an amateur astronomer, and one of my pet peeves is light pollution. Not only does it affect my hobby and makes it increasingly difficult for science to be carried out, but it is destroying a big part of the natural beauty of our environment, our natural heritage, and stealing something esthetically irreplaceable from our children.

What makes this particularly infuriating is that this plague is unnecessary. Light pollution is, by definition, caused by artificial lighting that does NOT contribute to our safety or security, it is escaped light from poorly designed fixtures that illuminates the dust in our atmosphere, reducing the dark sky contrast needed to see the stars. Much of the rest is unnecessary lighting that is either over-used, redundant, lights up empty places, or does not really help to illuminate anything at all. Not only that, it represents a considerable waste of energy. I estimate that the energy losses from light pollution add up to at least several percent of our national energy budget. This is a dollars and sense and national security problem, not just whining from a backyard stargazer.

Well, I realize I'm preaching to the choir on this forum about this, and no one likes to be preached to, even if they agree with the sermon. That's one reason why I've never brought this up here, even though I am quite passionate about this topic. But here is how I get my point across, subtly, where I think it might eventually do some good. The article is also illustrated by some beautiful artwork from my collaborator, Fritz Seegers, with the illos carefully designed to complement the text. This magazine has a circulation of several hundred thousand readers, and it is used extensively as a teaching aid in schools.

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Florida nights are special. We may not have the thin cold air of the mountain states, or the dry transparency of our western deserts, but we do have dark skies away from town. There is a lot of “country” here and we are surrounded by an undeveloped ocean-- there are lots of cloud-free evenings and beautiful year-round weather to enjoy them. But what really makes our night skies so spectacular is our geographical location. Unlike most of the United States, Florida is south, far south, and we get a clear look at the glorious southern sky. We can see southern stars higher in the sky than most other Americans, and we can see some things they can’t see at all. It is an indispensable part of our outdoor experience.

As our planet turns on its axis, the sky appears to rotate about us; it’s like being inside a huge celestial sphere with us at the center, a giant bowl of night with the stars painted on the inside. If we lived at either the north or south pole, we would only be able to see half the sky; the planet would be in the way and block our view of the other hemisphere. Likewise, if we lived on Earth’s equator, we would be able to see the entire sphere during the course of a 24 hour day. But for residents of North America, Florida is a place where we can enjoy the sights of the northern heavens and get a peek into a good piece of the southern sky as well, even if we can’t see all the way to the south celestial pole. Not only that, because we are so far from the Earth’s polar regions, our nights and days are of roughly equal length (no midnight Sun or long polar nights here!). We have the ability to see a bigger piece of the sky throughout the year than do the majority of our countrymen.

Of course, in any one day, a good part of the celestial sphere is invisible to us because it is in daylight and the glare of the Sun blots out the stars. Fortunately, as our home planet moves along its yearly orbit around the Sun, every day new parts of the sky slowly poke out of the eastern sunrise while the old stars slide gradually past the western sunset. During the course of a full year we get to see the entire sky visible from our location, with different celestial delights for every season. At sunset the show begins and as the night progresses the bowl of night turns from east to west, “new” stars rising in the east as “old” ones set in the west. By the next night, the Earth has moved a little further east along in its orbit, and the stars rise and set a few minutes earlier. As a result, we have different stars for every season, and the show replays for us every year. These are the cycles of the seasons and the hours, the great celestial calendar and clock that mark and guide the lives of every living thing on Earth. To understand this is to connect with nature, the planet, indeed, with the entire solar system. It is how we can see first hand how we fit into the universe; our ancestors were very well aware of this and we must never allow ourselves to forget it.

From our location near the equator, we can see deep into the southern half of the sky and there are many things there worth seeing. The Sun, Moon and planets never stray more than thirty degrees from the celestial equator, so we have a good spot from where to observe these celestial bodies. They are usually higher up in the sky than they are for our friends nearer the poles and we get a better look at them more often; and because of the geometry of the Sun’s path through the sky, it enters and leaves the horizon at a steeper angle, giving us short dusks and dawns. We are also fortunate that most of the Milky Way is visible to us as well, with only a relatively small part of it hidden from us year-round by the bulge of the Earth.

Almost everything we can see with our naked eyes at night is part of the Milky Way Galaxy. We are embedded in it, our Sun is just one of two hundred billion other suns that make up the Galaxy, a great flat disk of stars that slowly rotates in the infinite darkness of space. This great wheel is a gigantic flat circular swarm of stars, a hundred thousand light years across and about a thousand light years thick. ( For comparison, our Sun is eight light minutes from Earth, our Moon, less than two light seconds distant!). Astronomical distances are best expressed in terms of the time it takes light to travel them at 186,000 miles per second. Pluto is five light hours from Earth, and the nearest other star to our Sun is four light years away. Our Sun lies thirty thousand light years from the center of the Milky Way system, a common, ordinary star in the galactic suburbs.

No matter what direction we look from Earth, we see other Milky Way stars, but if we peer edgewise through the disk, we see the combined light of all of them, a misty belt that circles the entire celestial sphere: what the ancients called the Milky Way. It is an awe inspiring sight, a pale band of glowing light garlanded by bright stars. With even the slightest optical aid, such as binoculars, we can see it is made up of innumerable faint stars, like diamond dust scattered on black velvet. Unfortunately, it is becoming harder to see. The tiniest amount of light pollution, even the Moon, can wash out the pale glow and artificial lighting has created a world where sadly, most of our children have never seen this wonder of nature.

Astronomers tell us there are billions of other galaxies in the universe, but only three are near enough to be visible to the naked eye. One, the Andromeda Galaxy (about three million light years away), is almost directly overhead in autumn for Florida residents. Roughly similar to our own, it is barely visible to unaided vision as a faint fuzzy glow. Two other nearby small galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, can also be seen without a telescope, looking like detached pieces of the Milky Way, but they are too far south to be seen from anywhere in the northern hemisphere. They are named after the explorer Magellan, the great navigator who led the first circumnavigation of the globe. From our location we are also very well placed to look towards the center of our own galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius. The Milky Way appears thicker, brighter, there, and it is knotted and curdled with star fields and clusters, mottled with glowing nebulae and criss-crossed by dark clouds of interstellar gas and dust, all easily seen even without a telescope. It is a glorious sight to the naked eye, and a staggering one in binoculars. But you can’t see it from town. Unless it’s very dark and clear, you can’t see it at all.

Find a spot in the country or go out to sea, far from city lights, and choose a good night with no moon. After midnight, the atmosphere darkens and stabilizes; but what really matters is that the sky be dark, the way our ancestors saw it: the darker the background contrast, the fainter the star that can be seen against it. Enjoy this night, learn about it and share it with your children while it is still relatively accessible, it is rapidly becoming a rare treasure. The electric light is banishing the night sky; for the last century or so we have been losing our celestial heritage, our direct link to the eternal rhythms of nature. As artificial lighting spreads into the few remaining dark places of the world, the night sky is vanishing, right before our eyes.