Imagine looking up every night and being mesmerized by nature’s wonder. I don’t have to imagine. That was my every clear night when I lived in far northern Maine, a sparsely populated stretch of land near the Canadian border. It was one of the best things about living there.
How many times have you seen the Northern Lights? I didn’t have to fly to Alaska or Iceland. All I had to do was walk out my door or drive around Aroostook County. I probably missed just as many due to clouds or just being inside. (I saw the best one ever April 6, 2000, thanks to a call from a dear friend, who saw the Northern Lights out her window and knew I would want to. You could see that one down to Connecticut.) How about comets or meteor showers? What about stars as far as the eye could see? Or seeing the Milky Way?
That’s what you get every darkfall if you live far enough away from city lights. Or at least it used to be that way. Now light pollution is getting worse every year, according to a citizens science study Globe at Night and researchers in Germany and the United States. That study found an annual brightening of the sky 10% every year since 2011.
It’s “equivalent to doubling the sky brightness every 8 years,” according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
LED lights, human migration patterns and the march of civilization has done a lot of things. One is to drastically change the sky at night.
“The visibility of stars is deteriorating rapidly, despite (or perhaps because of) the introduction of LEDs in outdoor lighting applications,” the study said. “Existing lighting policies are not preventing increases in skyglow, at least on continental and global scales.”
That means that even in my lifetime, a little over a half century, the sky has gotten markedly brighter. Light pollution means that children growing up will end up seeing far fewer stars as an adult than they did when they were younger.
And that doesn’t even include the impact of Starlink satellites, which are bringing the internet to remote places but at a cost of light pollution for those of us who enjoy looking up at the sky.
It’s at a huge cost. The stars have, for as long as human beings have looked up, been essential to our existence. And they’ve beguiled us for that long.
“Every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature and Selected Essays.”
Or this: “The sky was clear — remarkably clear — and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse,” Thomas Hardy wrote in “Far from the Madding Crowd.” Or this from Joseph Conrad: “In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.”
The stars matter. What would we do without them?
Before I moved to Maine in the mid-1990s, I saw only a fraction of the sky above. I lived in cities and suburbs around Boston, New York and San Diego, where the everyday light even then masked all but the brightest stars. Rare would I glimpse a star that the light didn’t cover. But there were times: One week, when I was a teenager in October 1983, my stepfather and I went fishing and mostly slept under the stars on Lake Havasu, Arizona, before that part of the desert became populated, too.
I was shocked to discover how many stars you could see when you got far enough away from the city lights.
Then I went back to San Diego and its lights, and even without that, the fog rolling into Coronado almost every evening, blocking even the moon. It wasn’t until a dozen years later, when I was in my late 20s, living in Maine, did I get a chance to live under the stars again.
I didn’t just enjoy the night sky a little. I loved it a lot. I never was much for the outdoors life. My mother hated all forms of camping and believed the indoors was invented so you didn’t have to be out there with the insects and animals and rain. But I lost track of how many times I was blown away by the sheer beauty of the sky in northern Maine, day or night. Aroostook County’s rolling hills and farmland, with no mountains where I lived, led to more sky than I had other than in the West.
I grew up in the crowded East and West coasts, the houses close together and a big city never too far away, whether it was Boston or New York or San Diego. I’ve spent more than half my life near or in one of those three cities. And no matter how dark it got in the suburb, it was nowhere near as pitch black as a night driving up Interstate 95 between Bangor and Houlton, or walking to my garden in Abbot, Maine, or coming home from church on Maine Route 89 between Limestone and Caribou.
Or as lustrous. I was down in Bangor for work once a week for years, and I always drove back to Aroostook County, three hours or so in the car, late at night. I often was the only car on the road for an hour and a half or more. And sometimes I wouldn’t even have the radio or cassette player on in the car to keep me company. Just watching the sky, the intense moon rendering headlights almost unnecessary, the white or colored flashes of aurora borealis across the sky, or being able to navigate by stars alone.
I didn’t have a telescope in those days. I didn’t need one. What I could see with my eyes alone was plenty.
I have only been back to northern Maine once in two decades, and it was raining. So I don’t know what it was like in the intervening time, but I suspect that if any place in the country still has its fill of dark sky, it’s Aroostook County. I wish I could bottle it up for the rest of the country, the 80% or so of the United States that can’t see the Milky Way when it looks up.
I’m sad that succeeding generations won’t be able to see the same night sky that I did when I was younger. I know where I am right now, even though it’s 25 miles from a big city, is still too light to do much of any skywatching. It was so difficult, even on a clear night, to see the last big comet. It took five times to see it, when it should have only taken once.
Take it from a sky watcher: There’s nothing like the heavens. It makes you feel more alive.
It was nearly a quarter of a century ago, I still remember the light shows I saw almost every week.
They felt like they were blazing for me alone.
Nows and Forevers 
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