The New History of the Milky Way | Hacker News Reader

The New History of the Milky Way

quantamagazine.org

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>When the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of sub-Saharan Africa gazed upon the meandering trail of stars and dust that split the night sky, they saw the embers of a campfire. Polynesian sailors perceived a cloud-eating shark. The ancient Greeks saw a stream of milk, gala, which would eventually give rise to the modern term “galaxy.”

I'm extremely upset that this is an experience which has been removed entirely from the human condition by egregious light pollution. We should establish a global "lights out" night and shut these damn lights off for a few hours every now and then.

You should visit a dark site if you have the opportunity:

https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html

We should establish a global "lights out" night and shut these damn lights off for a few hours every now and then.

Too unsafe unfortunately. From traffic accidents to burglaries, shutting lights off has many negative side effects.

Looking at the map and recalling the places from which I've seen the Milky Way, it should be possible to already see something in light blue areas.

Having been to an actual dark site before, I can assure you that anything you experienced in a blue area is entirely unlike the experience of being at a genuinely dark location.

Crime isn't going to ruin everything if we turn off the lights for 2 hours per year.

At the least we should replace lighting in cities with directional lights pointed downwards, and stop wasting half of our light to the skies. We should also turn a portion of them off late at night.

I've also been to genuinely dark places - that's why I said "something".

It's the same, just more intense.

There’s also having properly hued lights to minimize impact. We’re messing up all sorts of things like circadian rhythms and light pollution with overly aggressive lighting.

Like most technology, artificial light is a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand you have things like aid programs to give poor folks LED lights so they can read at night (for e.g. kids' education) without burning fuel (typically wood or dung, leading to health problems and ecological degradation), creating "virtuous cycles". So that's good.

On the other hand, light pollution is so bad that kids grow up never seeing the night sky, effectively they are inside a virtual world. Shall we become Krikkiters? ( https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit )

When you look at a picture of the Earth at night from orbit and see the synthetic human mycelium of light spread over the land, it's kind of beautiful, but at the same time all those photons are waste, pollution. In infrared bands the waste is even more glaring. (That's not a pun, it's literal.)

Also, humans have great night vision. There's a whole mode where the peripheral vision takes over from the foveal vision and you can see just fine. It's quite literally like "nightvision" in D&D: you can't see in the actual absence of light, but you can see in starlight. Also, in this mode you can see luminescent fungi and bugs and such clearly. There was an article in the old "Whole Earth Quarterly" (which I think is now online and maybe searchable somewhere, so maybe I can dig it up...) about folks experimenting with this. They made hats with a bit of clothes-hanger-wire attached and a dot of glow-in-the-dark paint, such that the dot of luminescence was in the air in front of their eyes and, um, several inches (?) away. The method was to go into a natural (dark but not deep-forest-pitch-black) area, put on the hat, let the eyes fixate on the dot (to prevent you trying to look around with your foveal cells) and then direct your attention to your peripheral field of view (basically everything from the foveal "sweet spot", which is actually quite small, IIRC the size of your fist on your outstretched arm, to the sides of your head. Humans can see nearly 180°. You can test this yourself. Put up your arm and do a thumbs' up gesture. Wiggle your thumb as you move your arm to the side while looking straight ahead (don't move your eyes or head.) You should be able to see the motion to nearly 90°.) Anyhow, the folks in that article were running around in the woods and fields at night with no flashlights. Literally running. I'll see if I can dig up the link later today.

(Not to rant, but these new LED street lights and car head lights (and bike lights too) are blinding. They hurt my eyes!)

- - - -

Edit: Derp! It was "CoEvolution Quarterly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoEvolution_Quarterly

Unfortunately the website is borken: http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'new' (T_NEW) in /nfs/c02/h04/mnt/28620/domains/wholeearth.com/html/includes/public-config.php on line 12

And the Wayback Machine? https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wholeearth.com/

    Fail with status: 503 Service Unavailable

Hmm... Well, the internet itself has been flakey the last few days. (Or is that just Google?)

FWIW, they have some good stuff: https://archive.org/details/wholeearth

I went to the peak of Mauna Kea at night once and it was probably the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. I don’t think turning off lights in cities is particularly high priority though. I do know that once there was a power cut in LA I think, so people saw the Milky Way above... sone people called the police because they didn’t know what the strange lights in the sky were. That is quite sad.

Having grown up in a small town in the 1990s, I used to get pretty dark skies at night. The night sky combined with a few books on amateur astronomy from our school's library really fuelled my desire to understand the universe and our place in it.

I got photocopies of two star charts (for both hemispheres) off a book I found in our school library and began using the star chart for the northern hemisphere to study the night sky. The winter sky was and still is my favourite. To spot the easily recognizable Orion constellation and know that its second brightest star with the distinctly reddish hue is a red supergiant star that could explode any day was fascinating.

The 1990s were also a great time to grow up for an astronomy enthusiast like me. Two bright comets visited our neighbourhood in 1996-1997. First Comet Hyakutake visited us in March 1996 and then Comet Hale-Bopp became spectacularly bright in April 1997.

Now 23 years later, as an adult living in a severely light-polluted city, the recent Geminids meteor shower was rather disappointing. My wife and I went to our terrace to watch the meteor shower after midnight. A nice dark sky would have let us see about 2-4 meteors shooting across the sky every minute. But we did not have a nice dark sky. The whole sky was lit orange. As a kid, I would have never imagined a sky could have such a colour at night! We could spot only a meteor or two every 5-10 minutes.

I think it is very unfortunate that kids growing up in cities today do not get to see the beautiful night sky the way I did during my childhood days.

> You should visit a dark site if you have the opportunity

Me, my wife, and our 25lbs dog set up folding chairs in Arches National Park on a moonless night and destroyed our necks for a few days by staring in awe at the Milky Way. For the first time in my life, it was visible to my naked eye.

The only thing that saved our necks was the sound of coyotes howling nearby so we booked it back to the van for our dog's life.

Unfortunately no such lights out policy would hide the visible pollution from the more arrogant companies intending to fill the sky with satellites, e.g. StarLink

https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/s...

The astronomy problems presented by StarLink are really overblown. It is of especially little relevance to the average person gazing up at the sky, who generally finds the parade of satellites pretty cool.

So light pollution is okay if it's cool?

A lot of people love neon lights. Does that make neon lights an acceptable source of light pollution?

There's a huge difference between an entire metropolitan mega-city like the US East Coast projecting billions of watts of light into the sky, and a thousand sattelites in the vastness of LEO which occasionally passing overhead for a few moments. They contribute to light pollution on scales removed from each other by several orders of magnitude.

A lights out even would happen at night, not evening, so you'll have to find some other conversation to shoehorn this in to.

If you live in the NE US, consider a visit to Cherry Springs State Park[1] in central Pennsylvania. It's rated by the International Dark-Sky Association[2] as one of the best places in the eastern U.S. for stargazing. The sky view is spectacular, and being so far from the eastern urban sprawl it's such a peaceful place. It makes a great escape from the city, being only 5 hours by car from NYC.

[1] https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark/CherrySpringsSt...

[2]https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/parks/che...

I've been many times! It is beautiful, but I really wish we had access to better dark sites in the US East.

This will probably sound incredibly stupid and tone deaf, but having first gotten to view the galaxy in the complete and utter darkness of the desert Southwest of Albuquerque (I'm from a place with pretty bad light pollution/otherwise not great star gazing) at the age of 21 (not too far back,) I had the most profound sadness for the fact that some friends who'd committed suicide in Middle/High school had never gotten to experience this singular beauty that near all of humanity that's ever been has gotten to, spare the past 100ish years. Aside from like, every other obvious reason in which them taking their own life at that age sucks... something about getting to view stars densely packed and as far stretched in any direction of the entirety of my eyesight made me terribly sore for them, personally knowing for near a fact they weren't even slightly aware of such beauties of our world.

Furthermore, you look at the statistics of the US population that lives on the coast where it's light pollution like mad, and the percentage of them who never leave a certain radius of their birthplace their entire lives...

It's a travesty how many are completely unaware of what was forever a universal beauty. I say this even having somewhat bad and aura like eyesight when looking at bright things.

Really, what got me most in my experience, was in the unbounded twinkling, I was able to spot one patch of around 10 stars that were simply... little matte dots on the blackness of the galaxy. No twinkle, sheen, or real comparative "brightness" to them, really sort of an odd thing that stood out. I presume it's a mix of relative distance and brightness put together, but I'dve liked to know the magnitude of those two conditions that was larger. Hell, maybe they've just got a bit of a dust cloud in front of them. Either way... I'm sure they have their own name and wikipedia page as a grouping somewhere. One day I'm going to try to find it.

> When the Khoisan hunter-gatherers of sub-Saharan Africa gazed upon the meandering trail of stars and dust that split the night sky, they saw the embers of a campfire. Polynesian sailors perceived a cloud-eating shark. The ancient Greeks saw a stream of milk, gala, which would eventually give rise to the modern term “galaxy.”

This is one of the cases where wonder and grandeur and awesomeness of reality, makes every myth and imaginative explanation pale in comparison. Our ancient ancestor’s wildest dreams were not wild enough.

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