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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a rural place where we could see the texture of the milky way just stepping outside at night—it’s been fun taking friends who grew up in cities on wilderness backpacking trips and sitting out to watch the stars. There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.

I did also have a cool experience, deep in the backcountry at a high elevation camp some years ago: we went to sleep in a gale, the tent flapping all around, with a cloudy sky. I thought we’d get a big storm, but I woke up hot at 3am, the air totally still. I slid out of the tent and the sky was completely crystal clear. An incredible spread of stars. I watched for a while and noticed a reddish glow on the horizon. We were so far out and it wrapped around in all directions, so I knew it couldn’t possibly have been a town, but I was puzzled. I learned about airglow when we got out of the woods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airglow

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> There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.

I've only really experienced this once in my life. I was young teen, my family was visiting some family friends at a remote cabin. I woke up during the middle of the night and went out. It was a crystal clear winter night, and I was completely blown away at what I saw.

Once I had gotten over the shock, I thought "no wonder they called it the milky way". It was so bright, it felt like a new moon just smeared all across the sky.

Sadly not had the chance to experience that again. The then-remote cabin got swarmed by hundreds of others and so it's no longer pitch dark at night there.

I have it as a goal to get out in a really dark zone and see it again.

It's crazy that you can "see" (identify) the Milky Way at a level 5/6 on the Bortle Scale, even in the light pollution of the suburbs. But you don't realize just how brilliant it really is until you're really out to a dark sky spot.

For reference, the Bortle Scale[*] goes from 1 to 9, with 1 being pristine darkness and 9 being Manhattan.

Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July, as that's when the Earth's night sky is facing the most towards the Galactic Core. Go find yourself some deep dark sky on a new moon, and sit back and enjoy the enormity of the cosmos.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale#/media/File:How_l...

> Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July

Well I'm in Norway so those months we don't really have dark nights like in the winter.

Still, the sky was literally filled with light. Not just the milky way, but it was by far the most prominent feature.

This is one reason why living in the Southern hemisphere is better - dark clear winter nights right at peak milky way time.

When I was young, I used to lie on my back staring up at the sky, trying to grasp the incomprehensibly vast distances I was gazing at. It's really nuts when you think of it that way. The mental vertigo of it all is extraordinary.

I love watching the milky way on a clear, dark night. There are so many stars. Countless stars. It makes me feel really small and all my troubles (and the world's troubles) so insignificant. I love that feeling.

idk if it’s just my eyes getting old, or my LASIK, or the sky just not being dark anywhere anymore, but these trips don’t look the same to me as they used to. today it all just seems kinda static-y and fuzzy, but i remember my first night in the grand canyon being an absolutely amazing experience.

Outside of a few places like the Himalayas or Australia isn't not possible to see the darkness everyone lived in until street lighting.

This is the most accurate map and it still under reports light pollution under 21.5sqm https://www.darkskysites.com/

Worse satellite constilations may make it impossible to have a dark sky anywhere: https://arxiv.org/html/2604.09427v1

Led lights have caused such a massive increase in light pollution, let alone the effects on humans due to the blue spike, that they should be banned outright.

I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.

I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.

there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...

You can see the milky way at any location with a sqm of 19 or higher. True darkness is sqm 22.

Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.

I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.

My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.

I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.

I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.

Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.

In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.

>they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.

They are friendly in the same way the feeding a baby petrol is. Sure it's more energy efficient, but humans aren't machines where input = output. It's going to take decades to get rid of all of them, and then even longer for all the cancers that blue light causes to work themselves out. It's amazing that we invented a new asbestos and put a green wash on it.

From what I've seen, most of this energy-per-lumen efficiency has just been funneled into outputting more and more lumens, not actually saving energy. It's only going to get worse with the new 2027 regulations coming in.

> all the cancers that blue light

Blue light gives people cancer?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10452187/

In mice the link is clear and simple to test.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11311462/

In people for what cancers have been investigates there is also evidence of a link, but not enough studies have been done to say that it's the case for all cancers. This is absense of evidence rather than evidence of absence.

Interesting, thanks for the links. To be honest I'm not scientifically or statistically literate enough to know what to make of that beyond that there might be possibly something there, maybe.

It's so interesting that people assume the color of sodium lamps is the color of night just because that's the color technology made it at one brief moment in time. Just goes to show that illumination is culture, just like everything else

It's less sodium specifically, and more the general case of 'not using ultra-harsh high-K white light to badly mimic daylight'.

it might also have something to do with the orange glow of the sodium lamps resembling the orange glow of fire and torches, which were the primary medium of lighting in the dark for humanity for thousands of years

LEO satellites only cause problems around dusk and dawn, when they're exposed to light but the surface is not.

Because they're so close to the earth's surface it doesn't happen all night because they'll be in darkness too.

This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.

The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.

I remember as a teenager going for a road trip, there was a stretch of the road that had no street lights about 100km away from the closest city. Looking at the side of the car I was surprised just how bright it gets when the moon is out and the sky is clear. You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.

> You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.

The moon of course has the same brightness, as if you were in a city. This is the ability of your eyes, to see in the darkness, if there are no too bright other light sources.

It makes it easy to imagine how people made up Gods to explain the magnificence.

> There’s an awe to a true night sky that I think has real psychological impact.

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov

For almost all of human history we lived with that true night sky.

I wonder if the psychological impact is really the absence of the true night sky that we have. Maybe the awe we feel at seeing the true night is what we’re supposed to feel? Something to think about.

how can we "forget" the night Sky when the night is literally yellow? Im reminded every fucking night that Europe sucks?

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