At 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake caused a citywide power outage in Los Angeles. I lived there at the time and was among the many Angelenos who made their way outside, looked up and found a spectacular sight: a vast blanket of stars that had been blotted out for generations by light pollution. It was reported that some people were so bewildered by the diaphanous Milky Way, they called 911 and the Griffith Observatory to report strange, unidentified objects in the sky. I only remember being awe-struck.
Roughly 99 percent of the people living in the United States and Europe see only a dim approximation of stars in the night sky, nothing close to the bright firmament that our ancestors witnessed before humans harnessed electricity. The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, the study that reported the findings, also found that 83 percent of the world’s population cannot see a naturally dark sky because of the light emanating from cities.
Armed with those statistics, I found myself again looking skyward last October, this time lying face up on a long stone slab at Arches National Park in Utah...