What have we lost now that we can no longer read the sky?
aeon.co
aeon.co
Instead for most of us we cannot see more than 30 or so stars plus a few planets, due to light-pollution. So trying to do back-yard astronomy or simply star-gaze is futile and therefore we carry on with other pursuits.
Take people out to a dark site and they will always be awe-struck by the real night sky. Once you've persuaded them to go 100 miles into the wilderness... but in daily life the stars, galaxies and nebulae are simply pretty pictures in books.
I found that if you want to get urbanites looking at the heavens above, you should show them Iridium flares. Those are man-made objects, yes, but they can punch through all the light pollution and their short duration (a second or three) makes catching them an excellent sport.
My parents now live in Wyoming and the sad thing, to me, is that the few times I've been out to visit, it's been overcast the whole time. I remember as a young child in rural Arizona seeing many more stars in the sky than I ever see today... I just don't get out far enough to really see a more pure sky. Only thing that might get me on a cruise in fact.
A few of my favorites:
https://ryanbritton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Aurora.jp...
https://ryanbritton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DanceOfTh...
https://ryanbritton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sagittari...
https://ryanbritton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Eclipse.j...
I just got back from a trip to Zion National Park where I shot the Milky Way one night. It was clearly visible with the naked eye every night.
National Parks are a great place for night photography because they're usually 10s to 100s of square miles with no lights. Even Joshua Tree which is near Palm Springs is pretty good. You can see the light from both Vegas and Los Angeles from it, but in the right spot in the park you get some very dark skies.
Turned out it was pretty hard. I only got a chance to get some decent practice during the summer, which I often spent at my grandmother's house in the countryside. Today, there's a fair deal of light pollution even there and even well-known constellations are getting hard to identify. In my home city, at bloody 4 AM in the morning, on a very clear winter's night, I could maybe see 30-40 stars from my parents' balcony, if I squinted a little.
- It helps if you can identify small, local "clusters" of stars. E.g. even in a very dark sky where you can see stars you never remember seeing, Orion's belt is very easy to recognize, because three collinear stars so close together are a fairly rare sight. Same for the North Star -- it's not too bright, but it's related to two very recognizable constellations and you can find the North based on other clues as well, so you know where to look. Once you've identified one constellation, it's pretty easy to find the other ones.
- It also helps if you're familiar with how the sky looks in various seasons. This way, you have a pretty good idea about what should be where. Granted, this probably doesn't work well if you have to travel a lot. My home country is pretty small; in its northernmost point, the sky looks pretty much the same as in its southernmost. If I suddenly found myself transported from Maine to Texas, I imagine I'd be in some difficulty.
>"If humans do someday migrate outward toward the stars, our narrative space will move like an expanding wave before us, a vanguard of the imagination."
What reason is there to think that "narrative space" has to expand when a species becomes space-faring?
>"Our need for stories that help us find our way is too important to be left behind."
Why?
Are species or cultures that don't need stories somehow inferior?
Do we really need stories?
>"Knowing where you are in the world is fundamental to knowing who you are"
How do you measure "knowing who you are"? Are people who "know", better or more human than people who don't?
How can anyone claim that anyone "knows where they are"? How many people could point their exact location on a galactic map? (Less than one in a million?)
Can you point to any human cultures that don't? I'd argue that storytelling of some kind is integral to what makes us human, and that that propensity toward abstract thought and creativity really does make us "better" than other species, in at least one cognitive sense (though naturally I'm biased by being a human and if I were, say, a hyperintelligent squid or AI that somehow didn't think abstractly, it's possible to judge it differently).
For example, the "story" that all life on earth is descended from a single ancestor, and that we are all distant cousins with a pine tree, a wasp, and a cow, is quite compelling.
What is my place within my community?
What is the point of me being alive right now?
What is 'good'?
Stuff like that. I'm sure you could come up with science-y answers for these questions, but those answers would ultimately be yours, subject to your own experience and judgement. There's no empirical, scientifically objective way to approach these things. That's why religion is still a thing, and why we need stories.
Most art is storytelling though, so, I think the author just needs to tune into the insane amount of storytelling that happens now, even though most of it isn't focused on the stars.
Also, one reason why the scientist mentioned in the article didn't look at his star is because he couldn't know where it is. We can guess that the graduate student in question was Ethan J Schreier, who was in the MIT area until 1973, and the position of X-1 wasn't known until 1973, three years after the launch of the satellite. On the other hand, if I was that scientist, I would still have looked in general at the Hercules constellation, out of pure curiosity.
(The scientist in question certainly isn't Gursky, as he was a graduate student decades prior, but certainly also could've been Harvey Tananbaum. I had no information on been R. Levinson, Edwin M. Kellogg, and Giacconi [0] was a student at the University of Milan in the 40s.)
I once used Orion to navigate my way across an unfamiliar town when I took the wrong bus to an evening appointment and found out that the last bus stop on the line still left me with a two-mile walk to where I needed to go. These days I usually drive to evening appointments in the winter, but the stars are still a good guide which way I am driving on twisting exurban roads. Winter is better for seeing stars here both because the hours of darkness are longer and because the air is drier in winter (especially on cold nights) and there is less cloud cover hiding the stars from seeing.
You'll be surprised how many adults have never seen the milky way with their own eyes.