The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  The mountain is actually home to several telescopes, including a solar telescope trained on the sun (the surface of which looks like orange juice set at roiling boil), radio telescopes that in their oval shape remind me of a human eye (“They are,” Cipriano says. Eyes, that is, to look out into space), and optical telescopes owned by the Dutch government, by the Japanese, and by the Italians (“Telescopio Nazionale Galileo,” says one sign). Do we still imagine an astronomer at the telescope, if not in robes with a wizard’s cap, then perhaps sitting high up in a chair, peering directly into the eyepiece? Those days are past, to the point that astronomers here refer to being personally present to view the cosmos through the telescope as “classic mode.” Most of the viewing done here (80 percent) is by astronomers sitting at their computers in their labs back home. They schedule a time and a location in the sky, and the observatory sets the telescopes to their preference. That doesn’t make these telescopes any less impressive to me. I stand next to them, thinking that this is the edge of the earth and these are the earth’s best eyes: There’s arguably nowhere else in the world where we can see farther into space than with the GTC.

  Standing underneath the GTC—we’re allowed into the dome, thanks to the fact that Cipriano knows everyone—is like standing under a cat’s cradle made of steel, an enormous spiderweb of incredible weight. Looking around at the dome’s silver walls, I think how moving it must be to see the sliding doors open and have the universe exposed and framed, a most wonderful window. I imagine the frame and the slow revealing would make the sight of the sky even more dramatic, as looking up through the stained glass windows of a cathedral might inspire a view of heaven.

  “It’s the same vision,” says Cipriano. “A cathedral to connect the man with the God. Sometimes people say here is like a monastery, because you are in a very isolated place, and you are contemplating the sky.”

  Unfortunately, tonight will not be a good time to contemplate the sky. None of the three nights I’m in the Canaries will be. An enormous sandstorm has arisen, a calima, a hot, stifling wind from the Sahara desert blown west to muddy the Canary Island skies. When I ask one of the astronomers at the observatory if he will be observing tonight, he grimaces. “Oh, no, it’s horrible out there.”

  There’s nothing I can do. There won’t be any comparing of my experience seeing the night sky here with those Internet photos. No comparing of the world-famous Canary Island skies with my memory of that night not so far from here in Morocco, when my first thought was of swirling snow. No new experience of a night sky I would never forget. Cipriano, who, from the moment we met at the airport, has been a warm and generous host, is visibly disappointed. “It is not like this here,” he says. “Calima in this time of year is very strange.”

  At first, I’m disappointed, too. I was looking forward to seeing an amazing night sky. But just as both Sark and Mont-Mégantic offered the unexpected, so my time with Cipriano does as well. Rather than images of breathtaking starry night, I’m taking from the Canaries images of the future. Because of the work being done right now by people like Cipriano, there are still dark places on every map. Whether through Starlight Reserves, night tourism, or some other idea he hasn’t yet discovered, Cipriano Marin is doing all he can to help the rest of us realize we have a right to starlight and—perhaps more importantly—why we ought to claim that right.

  But there’s this, too: My sense is that Cipriano isn’t as concerned with his own right to starlight as he is with the rights of others, especially those who haven’t yet been born. Contemplation of a starry night sky—“our common and universal heritage,” he calls it—“is increasingly difficult to the point that it is becoming unknown for new generations.” I’m not going to see the stars in the Canaries on this visit, but I could come back next week, next month, next year, and see them then. That’s my right—that’s a possibility for me, for us. But if we fail to act now to protect and restore the skies we still have today, we will take that right from future generations without their even knowing what they have missed.

  “The big problem of the new generations is if you never know the grandeur of the sky, it’s impossible to reclaim it,” he says. “And finally, I think this is the most important motivation for me.”

  In other words, “I love my sky. This is my problem.”

  A week after standing under the world’s newest optical telescope, I’m in the Museo Galileo, in Florence, Italy, in front of the world’s oldest—the last two in existence known to have been made by Galileo Galilei, in 1609–1610. The longer of the two is tan, almost bamboo in appearance, and the shorter one is the darkest golden brown. They look fragile, and it’s probably a good thing that they are behind a wall of thick glass; it looks as if you could easily crack them over your knee. By today’s standards they are like a child’s instrument, but four hundred years ago they were state-of-the-art, and Galileo spent his nights in Padua, Pisa, and Florence seeing what almost no one else on earth could see. As the astronomer Tyler Nordgren told me, “Four hundred years ago, everyone in Florence could see the stars, but only Galileo had a telescope. Now everyone has a telescope but no one can see the stars.”

  I linger near Galileo’s telescopes, then round the corner and stand transfixed: I did not expect this—a dark, cool room full of globes of the night sky from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Globo celeste, they are called in Italian: “celestial globe,” maps of the night sky. Several are enormous, four or five or even six feet in diameter. Crafted of wood and lacquer, they shine an aged mahogany brown. Made with the best available astronomical knowledge of the day, they reflect in their constellations the shapes by which people made sense of the sky. And such shapes! A massive globe from 1693 by Vincenzo Coronelli catches my eye—a giant lion, a huge bear, and a long, curving snake are painted on in the shapes of constellations. Imagine looking into the sky and seeing such a menagerie of wildness crawling, swimming, and flying overhead. Unlike our contemporary skies washed flat by light pollution, these were three-dimensional skies—the detailed depths of space obvious to any sky-watcher on any clear night—and the creatures depicted have sinuous muscles and delicate eyes. You can’t touch these globes, can’t spin them around and stick your finger where you’d want to live or travel next. They rest, stilled on display—so you orbit them instead.

  The men who made these globes thought that the stars were unmoving and unchanging; that the sky revolved around the earth each night. Now we know “better,” but along with what we know comes the knowledge of what we have lost, since these globes display a sky most of us will never see. But then, they come from a world that no longer exists, in which creatures like this were more numerous and more widespread.

  Walking this room, I imagine Coronelli here, asked to build a contemporary globo celeste, and his perplexed, confused face. The result? Perhaps a palomino globe of gray-black, gray, and splotches of white. Would the animals still be there, the enormous lions and tigers and bears, the great-winged birds and long snakes with their grinning eyes? I bet not. The globes with shiny black backgrounds and storybook animals, with clear lacquer covering a wild sky, those maps are gone; he wouldn’t even try.

  But I imagine him making another globo celeste, this one smaller, yet still exquisitely painted, still breathtaking in detail. It’s a map of the earth still flowing with creation, one you can spin, and when you stop it with your finger, there is some tiny detail—he’s been working all night, every night, and sleeping during the days—some miraculous beauty, some wonderful example from each location at night. The white flower of a night-blooming saguaro cactus, the feathers from a great-horned owl, the scrunched, smiling face of a particular bat—here, I’m spinning it, I stop it in the north, where I want there to be something still—he’s painted the black-and-white feathers of a loon. This would be a globo celeste of the present-day world, the one that remains, like the older globes but smaller, because he wants us to look closer, to see what’s still there.

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bsp; And even another—he’s excited to be at work again—a globo celeste for which he’s gone all out with today’s technology, a type he couldn’t have made back then, one that causes him to wonder what the king would have given for this: a globe of night sounds, so that by touching your location you hear the night there—the cricket song, the ocean surf, the frog mating calls. This is a globe you spin in the dark, eyes closed, one you turn and then listen to: the world at night, a geography of nocturnal sound, still there, still waiting, for our ears.

  I have come to Florence to see the museum and I have made sure to come when the moon was full, so that I could walk this beautiful city in the moonlight, imagining what Galileo saw. But after talking with Cipriano about World Heritage Sites and night tourism, I am also eager to see how well Florence—the historic center of which was named a World Heritage Site in 1982—offers the night.

  The short answer is that it doesn’t. While the center of the city may be historic, the modern city has a bursting population of more than 375,000, with more than 1,500,000 in the greater metropolitan area. This is a major Italian city engulfed by artificial light, and not a small town surrounded by darkness. But what’s unfortunate is that even within the historic center, lights are allowed to clutter and glare as much as they do in any like-sized city. When I look down to write in my notebook, I can barely see the page from all the blue dots in my eyes. The fact of the city’s beauty—when I first see the Duomo I say “Wow” out loud—the fact of its being a UNESCO World Heritage Site, seems to have little bearing on its presentation at night. There seems to be little more than perfunctory attention paid to creating a unique nocturnal ambience. As I walk the city’s historic stones, the moon relegated to irrelevance by the city’s flood of light, I think over and over and over, What an opportunity missed. How much more beautiful would this city be with no glare, no blazing bright lights; if it were instead lit with care and thought, perhaps even lit with candles and moonlight. How beautiful would Florence be were the moon allowed back into the city, to wash its light on the Renaissance towers, the stone walls and courtyards, the open squares and narrow streets?

  And I do find streets here and there without glare. On some, you can see for blocks to the end of the street—so much more thoughtfully lit, so much more welcoming. In fact, these streets are so clearly more inviting that I immediately think, Someday this will be the standard. Someday this is what people will expect and demand. Someday people will grow sick of bright, unnecessary light. But as it is, it’s as though Florence fights itself. That perhaps it employs two lighting designers, one with a philosophy of beauty and the other with a philosophy of fear. For that is the excuse the current politicians use—that with all these tourists (to say nothing of citizens), we need this light for safety. But especially in a place like Florence, that argument feels silly. The streets are full of people—even after midnight on a Sunday night, there are plenty of couples, groups of friends, happy to be out walking (though I hear as much English spoken as anything, certainly more than Italian). Are we so afraid of the dark that we must sacrifice what would be such an experience of beauty, the human-made beauty of the buildings and streets, flames and fires, with those beauties we’ve no hand in making—the moon and the stars and the darkness?

  While at the museum, I had met Karen, an American married to an Italian and working as a docent. She told me that the lighting level in the city has increased a tremendous amount in the last decade; that because her little street is lit more brightly now, people use it as a toilet, urinating on her apartment building under her window. She and her husband no longer walk after dark, she said, “because I don’t want him to get angry and argue with someone who has a knife.” She explained, too, that Florence has something each year they call Notte Bianca, or White Night: The museums and stores stay open much later, some through the night, and the lights are left on. “It doesn’t have that much to do with appreciating darkness,” she admitted.

  As I walk back to my hotel after midnight, I think about how we go inside and the beautiful city—just as beautiful at night—goes unnoticed, except maybe by the garbage men, the Carabinieri in their squad cars, the gelato girls biking home after a long day of serving Americans. I think of how in Belgium now, and in France, one day a year is declared “the day of the night,” and cities and villages across each country spend the night without lights. People come out to join in activities celebrating night, to raise awareness of energy consumption, light pollution, and the beauty of darkness. Activists I’ve spoken to in Paris hope the movement spreads across the continent.

  And that’s the thought I have before going inside, leaving the moon above the city. What would that look like, a European day of the night? What would it look like from space; what would it look like on the streets? How would it look here in Florence? Where would it lead?

  2

  The Maps of Possibility

  To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination—is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.

  —JOHN C. VAN DYKE (1901)

  Before imagining the night we might know in the cities and towns where we live, I wanted to return to one of the darkest places I have ever been. From the northwest corner of Nevada up into the eastern Oregon deserts spreads one of the last great areas of natural darkness left in the United States. And here I am, in the Black Rock Desert, with one good friend, two fold-up chairs, and the last few minutes of twilight.

  I have been here before—I remember waking before dawn one night to find a blood-red waning crescent moon lifted barely above the eastern horizon, and I remember another night of unsettling wind—but I’ve not been here looking for darkness. The drive from Reno is barely two hours, taking us out past Pyramid Lake on Highway 55 to Gerlach, the last town before the desert. When you leave town on the paved highway, curving at the base of hills, the desert playa begins to expand off to the right, and before long you simply turn off the highway and begin your dust-raising race across the roadless land. It can be unnerving at first, having no road—car tracks lead this way and that, scattering in all directions—but soon enough you’re back to full speed, as if auditioning for a car commercial, blasting across flat desert playa.

  Where to stop for the night? My friend and I agree to drive until 8:30 and then stop. Nothing marks the land to differentiate this spot from any other; it’s simply chance. The playa spreads all around, taupe scales of clay as far as you can see, an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Deep blue night rises over the range in the east like a billowing sandstorm, while a rosy bloom fades in the west. You feel far from anything. We turn off our phones to keep them from searching for service all night. And with no phones we have no clocks. We turn off artificial time and set up our chairs to watch the night arrive in natural time.

  Sting will be here next month for Burning Man—the annual August festival with tens of thousands of partiers and a ritual burning of a giant sculpture the final night—but tonight we have miles and miles to ourselves. We feel like astronauts on the moon must have felt, except we’re in shorts and we brought along a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee. We also have beer. (I don’t think they did, although I could be wrong. There is the old story about the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who, after the Eagle had landed but before he and Neil Armstrong took their giant leaps, took out a small communion kit he’d told no one he was bringing along.)

  My chair facing west, I watch the earth turn from the sun back into space as though falling back into waiting arms. The daylight’s fade reveals the first stars, and suddenly there’s that every-once-in-a-while realization: The stars are above us all the time, all day long, but we only get to see them at night. In the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall,” six suns circle the world so that it never experiences night, and peo
ple panic when an eclipse of those suns promises darkness. Apocalypse! But here, that promise is welcome. We sit back and wonder what will be revealed.

  Meteors! That’s what. Astronomers talk about being able to see the Milky Way as the mark of a good dark sky, but for me it’s the presence of shooting stars, their sudden ephemeral scratch of light. When a giant shooting star with a long smoky tail burrows its way across our sky, our conversation ceases and we laugh. Two friends, looking out into the universe.

  No cars, no engines, no wind or birds or rushing water, no television or radio. It’s quiet here, that eternal kind, like you’ve gone back in time. Train tracks run along the southern edge of the desert, and there sometimes are trains, long snakes with heads glowing yellow bright. But they’re so far away that they pass in silence, like a night mirage

  After midnight in the Black Rock Desert, after every last ounce of sunlight is gone, we walk in the dark, my friend toward the Big Dipper, I toward the Milky Way. Both come down as though touching the ground, as though just over there, as though if we just keep walking we will have stories to share. Straight overhead, the Summer Triangle shines in three dimensions, and you feel as though you’re walking not under but among stars, the night so dark that it’s no longer dark, your adapted eyes guided by the faint glow of mud lit by the stars.