4 Responses to “You’ve Never Seen the Milky Way like this..”

1. 1.   Sean McCorkle Says:
   April 24th, 2011 at 2:26 pm

   That’s a very beautiful film, Sheril, and thanks for posting.

   However, I have seen the Milky Way like that—not in time lapse, but with equal or better clarity, most recently from Canyonlands National Park (much like it appears in the works of Wally Pacholka) and also from other National Parks in the American West (Badlands, Mesa Verde, Theodore Rooseveldt, all hundreds of miles away from sources of light pollution).

   The sky really does look like this when there’s no light pollution. Its supposed to look like this. If you can’t see this on a clear moonless night, then it has been taken from you. Its been taken from most of us, to the extent that many have never seen the Milky Way at all, and are unaware of what they’ve missed.

   Its hard to put into words the damage that has been done by pervasive spread of light pollution, the nearly complete removal of a direct connection to the source of awe and mystery that has driven human civilization for millennia, the source of inspiration for the likes of Gallileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and so many others, and the science they achieved because of it. It is precious, yet we have deprived ourselves and our children of clear sight of the Galaxy and Universe in which we live, the size and scale of which can not fail to instill a sense of wonder and new perspective in anyone who looks.

   Those of us who still remember what the sky looks like are reduced to driving thousands of miles to get a look. The american east and midwest are lost. The few remote locations where one can actually see the sky that remain in the west are going fast. Add vanishing sky to the already large list of man-made environmental stresses on these parks.

2. 2.   Gaythia Says:
   April 24th, 2011 at 3:39 pm

   Teje Srgherd’s photography actually shows several conflicting phenomena, the Milky Way, and a dust storm from the Sahara. And it’s not light free! Even from Spain, the dust is backlit by reflections from Grand Canary Island, (see the details at his links). Like Sean, I too have been, here in the west, to remote places where the stars can be viewed with incredible clarity. But not always, even when the skies are cloud free. Pollution and dust can create a haze that obscure the skies even in places far removed from man made light sources.

   Sean makes a very important point though about what we’ve lost. How can we interest people in the science of astronomy and the origins of the universe when they can’t see the stars in all of their awesome grandeur?

3. 3.   Dark tent Says:
   April 24th, 2011 at 9:23 pm

   The best view I ever had of the Milky Way was from above 11,000 feet in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming.

   I’ve also seen it from the Maze district in Canyonlands and many other places off the beaten track in the Western US, Canada and south America (Ecuador and Peru)

   As Sean alludes to above, many people simply don’t know what the sky used to look like in most places, just as many people don’t know what the oceans used to look like (with all the fish and corrals and everything).

   As ecologists like Jeremy Jackson have pointed out, most people aren’t aware of the degradation because the “baseline” is ever-shifting by small amounts over individual lifetimes — each year, there is a little more background light so you can see fewer stars.

4. 4.   ‘La Montaña’ « [Px] Says:
   April 28th, 2011 at 8:17 pm

   [...] Terje Sorgjerd grabó esta secuencia desde la montaña más alta de España [El Teide], sitio donde se localiza uno de los más reconocidos observatorios. [...]