The Light That Obscures The Stars

Our nights may be illuminated for our convenience - but at the cost of beauty

Photo by John Fowler on Unsplash

Take a step outside of your door at night and look up. What do you see? A breathtaking spectacle or black empty nothingness? Endless shimmering stars stretching across the heavens or a black canvas dotted here and there with faint glimmers that might be stars (or passing aeroplanes)? The outcome of this exercise ultimately depends on where your dwelling place resides: the city or the village, the rural or the urban, the wilderness or the urban “jungle”. For in the city, the light of the stars must compete with other lights, the lights of our industrial and electrified age¹.

---

Our urban spaces, while giving us so much good, have also taken away from their inhabitants so much of that which is precious from creation: nature, silence and solitude, and clean fresh air. But perhaps one of the most precious things that urban spaces deprive us of is the nightly spectacle of a sky saturated with glimmering celestial bodies. As improbable as it seems, light pollution from our streetlights, headlights, and industries is strong enough to obscure and outshine the light emanating from stars whose sheer size would make our sun seem obsolete. The impossible task that Abraham was given by God (to number the stars in the sky)², is now well within the realms of possibility for modern urban dwellers who are looking up at the few faintly glimmering stars that remain in the empty void of the city night sky. We have thus deprived ourselves of so much beauty - and we barely seem to even notice.