Blinded by Light
Why should anyone care to gaze upon the night sky? I had no special reasons for this until I came to know about ‘Light Pollution’.
Look at this picture. This is how India looked at night in the year 2012.
And five years later it looked like this.
Man-made light, illuminating the night sky; looks beautiful, but its just another pollution. And these lights also reveal how vastly we have inhabited our country.
Due to light pollution, the night sky isn’t dark anymore. And it is called 'Skyglow' or 'Sky Brightness’.
So when we look at the night sky affected by light pollution, we shall only see the bright stars that manage to get to us.
But, if we go to very dark places, away from cities and towns, we can see thousands of stars by our naked eyes. And astronomers who observe the night sky using light-sensitive telescope have to do this whether they like it or not.
Thanks to Mr Sriram Murli, who went to many dark places and made a time lapse video of those night skies and shown very clearly how light pollution steals away all the beauty.
(Fullscreen Link: https://youtu.be/0FXJUP6_O1w)
If you didn’t recognise a patchy silvery cloud in the video, don’t worry you are not the only one, most of the people don’t know about it. When there was a massive power outage in Los Angeles in 1994, people out there called the cops in fear of the same thing. They would had amazed to know that it is the same galaxy that they were living in, 'The Milky Way’!
Nearly 80% of the world population lives under Skyglow, that is, they will never experience the view of Milky Way from the place they live in. And it is growing by 2% every year. Every night we are missing this incredible view, especially the children who may find it as a source of inspiration.
So now you have known about this, you may be thinking to visit such dark places for star gazing, right?
But I want to give you a unique reason to star gaze to make your trip more memorable.
In our chemistry classes, we were taught that everything is made up of one or other kind of atoms called 'Elements’, eg. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon etc; remember the periodic table of elements right!
But how these elements itself were formed?
The elements are formed by those little stars that twinkle in the night sky. You, me and every other thing in our world except hydrogen and helium are made from star stuff. 90.5% of your body is made from the ashes of some dead star long ago and remaining 9.5% is hydrogen which formed at the birth of the universe.*
In other words, the iron in your blood, the calcium in your teeth and bones; the nitrogen in your DNA, the oxygen that you breathe and the carbon in your organs are all traceable to those twinkling stars in the night sky.
Just look upon yourself in the mirror, isn’t it astounding to know that the constituents that make your body were cooked by some stars billions of years ago!
Now instead of planning a trip to such places what if you can see this starry night every day from your home by eliminating the light pollution itself! Luckily, it is not very difficult, we just have to design the outdoor lightings in such a way that they don’t send any light directly to the sky and turn them off when not needed. The problem is lack of awareness and lack of interest towards the issue. It can be solved only when we understand the importance of nature and its beauty.
The irony is that, for thousands of years people have looked upon such night sky and enjoyed its beauty, however, they hadn’t knew the reasons to cherish it. Today, with the help of science we know many things about nature, but now people themselves are untouched by it.
According to biologist E.O. Wilson, humans have an inherent love for nature and he calls it, 'Biophilia’; and says,
“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”
I find them very true. In this modern world there are so many ways to entertain ourselves and there are so many things to make our life simpler and more comfortable. But a quality life is a life surrounded by nature and natural things. And by destroying it we ourselves are becoming victims of poor quality life.
I wrote this article to set an example to show you how easy it is to lose our connection with the natural world. Indeed, we are now blinded by man-made lights, but I just hope that we at least realize the importance of natural world, then only we could do something to preserve it.
P.S.
Light pollution is also a wastage of energy and it affects the health of all living creatures, because they all are genetically adapted to the normal day-night cycle and we have disturbed it badly. For them it is like trying to sleep with a very bright lamp turned on. It also has many effects on humans like stress, sleeplessness, mood swings, high blood pressure and depression.
(Fullscreen Link: https://youtu.be/5sJxTKQ1YnY)
*The processes are named Stellar Nucleosynthesis and Supernova Nucleosynthesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis?wprov=sfla1
More on Light Pollution:
- Light Pollution on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution?wprov=sfla1
- International Dark Sky Association. http://darksky.org
- Sriram Murli’s website, Saving the Dark, http://savingthedark.com,
- http://fb.com/savingthedark