The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  I am grateful for the grants I received while at Wake Forest University, which supported my research for this book. These include grants from the Archie Fund for Arts and Humanities, the Dingledine Fund, and the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability (CEES).

  To my new colleagues at James Madison University, thank you for bringing me aboard. Thanks especially to Laurie Kutchins.

  In addition to offering my deepest thanks to those I quote directly, I wish to thank several others who were instrumental in my writing and research. These include Lynn Davis of the National Parks Conservation Organization, James Fischer of Zoolighting, Roberta Moore, Kelly Carroll, and the rangers at Great Basin National Park, Peter Lipscomb in Santa Fe, Kathleen Dean Moore of Oregon State University, Don Miller of Severson Dells Nature Center, Mary Adams from the Headlands Dark Sky Park in Michigan, Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium, Gary Harrison of the University of New Mexico, Siegrid Siderius in Amsterdam, Nicolas Bessolaz in Paris, Wim van Driel in Paris, Belgium’s Friedel Pas, Franz Hölker in Berlin, Rowena Davis and Scott Kardel of the International Dark-Sky Association. Alex Pollard in London, Yves and Sandrine Lavenant in Paris, Alison Harris in Paris, Bob Crelin for the drawings, Peter Baldwin for his book, Paul Klass for the legal background. In addition, here’s to many more wonderful meals in Paris with Emma and Philippe Aronson.

  Special thanks to Christian Luginbuhl, Richard Stevens, and Steven Lockley for their expert knowledge and interest in this book.

  I remember the day I heard my agent’s name for the first time. I was walking on the Northland College campus with Steven Rinella, a visiting writer from New York, telling him about my book idea. “Oh,” he said, “you gotta talk to Farley.” Farley Chase has been everything a writer could hope for in an agent, and I look forward to working with him for years to come.

  To have this book published by Little, Brown is a dream come true. I have had the great pleasure of working with John Parsley as my editor. His ever-present cheerfulness and wise editorial eye have made this book significantly stronger than it would have been.

  Thank you to everyone at Little, Brown for working hard to bring this book out into the world. Thanks especially to Pamela Marshall and to Carolyn O’Keefe, and to Janet Byrne, my copyeditor. Thanks to Tyler Nordgren for the cover art.

  Thank you to Louise Haines at HarperCollins UK.

  Finally, to my family: aunts Joanne, Myrna, Mary, and Ruth; Uncle Jim and Aunt Carol; my cousins; my sister, Rachel, and brother-in-law, Bob. To the memory of my grandparents, Cecil and Evelyn Bogard, and Milton and Gladys Holcomb. To Luna, the best dog friend ever. And to my parents, Judith and John Bogard, who have been there for me always.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Author photo by Paul Bogard

  Paul Bogard is the editor of Let There Be Night, an anthology of twenty-nine original essays on the value of darkness and the consequences of light pollution. He teaches writing at James Madison University in Virginia.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  In Isaac Asimov’s story “Nightfall” (1941), six suns surround a planet so that it never experiences darkness. When a fluke eclipse blocks all six suns, civilization is thrown into panic.

  The advertising slogan “What Happens Here, Stays Here” has been used by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority since 2005.

  The images I describe from the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, and 2025 come from The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, created in 2001 by Pierantonio Cinzano and Fabio Falchi at the University of Padua in Italy. Cinzano and Falchi took mid-1990s satellite data provided by Chris Elvidge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and created their colorful maps by estimating backward and forward in time. They are now working on a new atlas based on more recent data. The original atlas may be viewed at: http://www.lightpollution.it/worldatlas/pages/fig1.htm.

  The information on Mizar and its fainter binary, Alcor, comes from Emily Winterburn’s entertaining The Stargazer’s Guide: How to Read Our Night Sky (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). She defines Mizar as a visual binary, meaning “pairs of stars that revolve around each other… due to the gravitational pull exacted on one by the other.” Arab astronomers knew Mizar and Alcor together as “horse and rider.”

  Wendell Berry’s poem “To Know the Dark” comes from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (San Francisco: Counterpoint, 1998).

  The attraction of squid to bright lights is much like that of moths to a flame. For more on squid boats and their day-mimicking lights, go to Russ Parsons, “Lights, Nets, Action,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2007, http://www.latimes.com/la-fo-squid312007jan31,0,5288418.story?page=1. A squid fishing boat light is “100–1,000 times brighter than the natural condition,” explain researchers at Japan’s Hokkaido University (www.pices.int/publica tions/presentations/PICES_12/pices_12_S3/Fujino_956.pdf), in an article that includes a dramatic view of squid fishing fleets as seen from satellites. Also see “Bright Lights, Big Ocean” (http://www.darksky.org/assets/documents/is193.pdf), which details the effects of cruise ships and offshore oil rigs and argues, “it is not true that the darkness of the oceans is like it was even 20 years ago.” And this was 2003.

  For an excellent history of early lighting “technologies,” see Jane Brox’s Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010). In just one example, “Shetland Islanders caught, killed, and stored storm petrels by the thousands.” When islanders needed a torch, they would affix a petrel carcass, “a sea bird, full of buoyant, insulating oil… to a base of clay, thread a wick down its throat, and set it alight.”

  In the February 2001 issue of Sky & Telescope, John E. Bortle explained the origins of his scale this way: “Unfortunately, most of today’s stargazers have never observed under a truly dark sky, so they lack a frame of reference for gauging local conditions. Many describe observations made at ‘very dark’ sites, but from the descriptions it’s clear that the sky must have been only moderately dark. Most amateurs today cannot get to a truly dark location within reasonable driving distance.… To help observers judge the true darkness of a site, I have created a nine-level scale.”

  “Thirty years ago,” Bortle lamented, “one could find truly dark skies within an hour’s drive of major population centers.” But “this is no longer possible.”

  The winter I really began to learn the constellations and feel a hunger to know more about the night, the night sky, and darkness, I spent several evenings on the floor of the (now defunct) Border’s bookshop in Albuquerque, paging through every book on the shelves marked “astronomy.” No book caught my interest more than Chet Raymo’s The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage (Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 1992; reprint, 2005). Mixing analogies (“If the sun were a golf ball in Boston, the Earth would be a pinpoint twelve feet away, and the nearest star… would be another golf ball… in Cincinnati”) with quotes from Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs (“The gifts of night are less tangible”), Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke (“In a dark time the eye begins to see”), and many others, Raymo captured the sense of fascination and wonder that so often accompanies becoming aware of the world after dark.

  Because we can see only a fraction of the universe, we can only guess at the number of galaxies it holds. Author Fraser Cain writes, “The most current estimates guess that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. A recent German supercomputer simulation put that number even higher: 500 billion. In other words, there could be a galaxy out there for every star in the Milky Way” (http://www.universetoday.com/30305/how-many-galaxies-in-the-universe).

  In Greek and Roman mythology, the Milky Way formed from Hera’s breast milk (Greek) or from the breast of Ops, Opis (Roman). But other ancient cultures had different explanations. One Cherokee folktale tells of cornmeal spilled by a thieving dog and describes the Milky Way as “The Way the Dog Ran Away.�
� People living in southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert saw it as embers from a fire. Australian Aboriginal people saw it variously as a river in the sky-world, termites blown into the sky, and thousands of foxes carrying away a dancer. Whatever the explanation, for every culture across the world the Milky Way was a regular presence in everyday life.

  9: From a Starry Night to a Streetlight

  “I am sure Las Vegas has the brightest pixel of any urban center,” Chris Elvidge told me from his office at NOAA in Boulder, Colorado. In 1996, Elvidge used data gathered from a military satellite 528 miles overhead to map city lights and determined that Las Vegas was the brightest city on Earth, with New York and Madrid runners-up. While nearly two decades of rapid economic growth in China has made many of the cities in that country quite bright, Elvidge told me that “based on the Luxor beacon” Las Vegas could still claim the brightest spot on Earth.

  Of his “Class 9: Inner-city sky,” John Bortle wrote: “the entire sky is brightly lit, even at the zenith. Many stars making up familiar constellation figures are invisible, and dim constellations such as Cancer and Pisces are not seen at all. Aside from perhaps the Pleiades, no Messier objects are visible to the unaided eye. The only celestial objects that really provide pleasing telescopic views are the Moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters (if you can find them). The naked-eye limiting magnitude is 4.0 or less.” This describes the sky over Las Vegas, New York, and dozens of cities around the world. But this tells us what we still can see. What has been lost? Consider that in a Class 9 sky the winter constellation Orion shows only its brightest stars, such as Betelgeuse and Rigel and the stars of its belt. Then, consider that these stars are brighter than 98 percent of the stars we should be able to see. That is, 98 percent of the sky has been wiped from view.

  If the term “star party” conjures a vision of geeky astronomers ooo-ing and aah-ing while crowded around a telescope, well… that’s often close to the truth. A star party can mean anything from a couple of amateur astronomers setting up their scopes on top of a campus building to multiday festivals that draw devoted stargazers from around the region, the country, or even the world to an especially dark location. In most cases, star parties provide people with excellent opportunities for public viewing alongside amateur astronomers who are more than willing to share everything they know about the sky.

  In North America and western Europe, the Milky Way bends overhead twice a year, once in the winter and again in the summer. In the northern hemisphere we look toward the center of the galaxy during the summer, and so the view overhead is more dramatic than in winter, when we look away from the center of the galaxy.

  While in Las Vegas their brilliant glow may blend in with the surrounding wash of light, in most locations digital billboards stand out with blinding force. Unheard of only a decade ago, these fabulously bright and ever-changing billboards have been spreading across the United States with remarkable speed: While as of 2010 only about two thousand of the country’s four hundred fifty thousand billboards were digitized, several hundred are being added every year, and experts predict that there will eventually be more than fifty thousand. While proponents tout their ability to host several advertisers at once, critics call them “TV on a stick,” claim they create safety hazards by distracting drivers, and warn that, once in place, they are very difficult to remove.

  First observed in Sydney, Australia, in 2006, Earth Hour has now spread across the globe. While primarily intended to draw world attention to energy use and climate change, the movement’s symbolic turning off of the lights on famous landmarks serves as a powerful reminder of our ability to address light pollution. See www.earthhour.org for details, including inspiring videos of the lights on landmarks around the world switched off, including the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum in Rome, and the Opera House in Sydney.

  Find Ellen Meloy’s wonderful essay in Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River (New York: Henry Holt, 1994) as well as in several anthologies. At the time of her sudden death in 2004, Meloy was at the height of her writing powers, having produced such books as The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002) and The Last Cheater’s Waltz (1999).

  The drawing of arc lighting on the Place de la Concorde in Paris that I’m thinking of can be found in Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This fantastic study of the development of artificial light covers—with subtle humor and steady insight—the way artificial lighting changed from oil to gas to electric, and the effect of this change on the city street, the interior of the house, and the stage. For anyone interested in lighting at night, this book is invaluable.

  Because arc lights were far too bright to be placed in existing gas lamp fixtures, they had to be placed high above the city streets. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw American cities as diverse as Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Mobile, San Francisco, and Buffalo erect tall towers topped with arc lights. For the most part, these towers failed to live up to their promise and quickly fell out of favor. But visitors to Austin, Texas, can still see several of the old (from 1895) “moonlight towers” in action.

  The idea of turning night into day has never really gone away. Most recently, the American politician Newt Gingrich was ridiculed for his proposal (originally made in 1984) to position giant mirrors in space that would reflect sunlight down onto Earth and as Time’s Jeffrey Kluger explains, thus “eliminate the need for nighttime lighting on highways and serve as a deterrent to crime by brightening shadowy neighborhoods.” See Jeffrey Kluger, “The Silly Science of Newt Gingrich,” Time, December 15, 2011, www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2102471,00.html#ixzz1mPsa9kJb.

  Jill Jonnes’s book Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003) is a well-told history of a changing world, “dramatically transforming man’s age-old sense of day and night.”

  For a fascinating look at America before the advent of electric light, see Peter C. Baldwin’s In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). From its first line (“To step into an unlit city street in early America was to enter a world shockingly different from our own”) through sections such as “The Night Children” and “Sex and Danger in the Man-filled City,” Baldwin’s history describes for the contemporary reader this “shockingly different” world of not all that long ago. In an earlier article, “How the Night Air Became Good Air,” Baldwin tells an amusing story about John Adams and Benjamin Franklin bunking together while on the road, and of Franklin wanting the window open but Adams wanting it closed for fear of the ill health night air would bring (“I, who was an invalid and afraid of the Air in the night”). Franklin’s lengthy explanation to his friend that there was nothing to worry about eventually put Adams to sleep (Environmental History 8, no. 3 [July 2003]).

  The drawing from John Jackle’s City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) is on page 46. One of Jackle’s most compelling arguments is that, above all, “public urban spaces at night were reconfigured to accommodate the automobile.” The briefest look at any American city at night would seem to confirm this.

  There is no shortage of information available about light pollution. See especially Bob Mizon’s excellent Light Pollution: Responses and Remedies (London: Springer, 2002) and the International Dark-Sky Association’s Fighting Light Pollution: Smart Lighting Solutions for Individuals and Communities (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2012), as well as the IDA’s website, www.darksky.org. For a quick gauge of sky quality, locate the Little Dipper. If you can see all four stars in its cup, you have basically good, dark skies. If you can only see the two stars at the front of the cup, your skies are fair to poor. In most American and European cities you can’t see the Little Dipper at all.

  Examples of good (that is, fully shielded) and not-so
-good (glaring) lighting fixtures. (Bob Crelin/IDA)

  The quote from Thoreau about wanting to know “an entire heaven” comes out of his journal from March 23, 1856. See The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

  Bob Berman’s column on stupid questions, “ ‘F’ in Science,” can be found in Astronomy from September 2003. My favorite: “Does Mars Have a Sun Like Our Sun?” Berman’s wonderful Secrets of the Night Sky: The Most Amazing Things in the Universe You Can See with the Naked Eye (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) has twenty-nine chapters divided among four seasons. His most recent book is The Sun’s Heartbeat (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), and his website is www.skymanbob.com.

  The quote from Michael Hoskin about the fascination with sheep guts can be found in The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For anyone interested in the subject (of astronomy, that is), Hoskin’s book is an excellent choice.

  The information on Julius Schiller’s ill-fated attempt to Christianize the constellations comes from Winterburn’s The Stargazer’s Guide, one of the many books on viewing the night sky currently available. Perhaps one hopeful sign amid the ever-growing level of light in our nights is the fact that new books on viewing the stars are being published regularly—it seems that, even if we can no longer see the stars, we remain interested in learning about them. Among the many fine books on my shelf: The Starry Room: Naked Eye Astronomy in the Intimate Universe, by Fred Schaaf (New York: Wiley, 1988); The Starlore Handbook: An Essential Guide to the Night Sky, by Geoffrey Cornelius (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1997); and, of course, Chet Raymo’s An Intimate Look at the Night Sky (New York: Walker, 2001). In addition, several smartphone apps offer instant information about the night sky. These include Pocket Universe and Star Walk for iPhone users and Google Sky Map for Android users. Of course, future apps will certainly be even more advanced—and the present ones are already impressive. But it’s worth noting that these apps work whether your night is truly dark or not, that even if you can’t see the stars, you can see the “stars.” One wonders if using such apps will inspire a desire to know a real night sky, or if we will be content knowing what that sky ought to look like, if only.