When I was in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago, the TV weather forecaster said “It will be partly cloudy this afternoon with sunny skies tonight.” After a few seconds, I realized what he said and laughed.
But, even without sunlight, the light in cities is bright enough to read a book by.
GLOBE at Night (http://www.globe.gov/GaN/analyze.html) was a web-based field campaign held a few weeks ago to let people report what the night sky looked like where they lived. They looked at a familiar constellation, Orion. The more stars that they could see, the “better” the net sky for observing stars. Some people probably drove or walked to their favorite observing spot. When I was a child, we had a favorite place to go just outside of town to view comets or satellites.
Light pollution is really what makes it hard to see the night sky. I thought when I was younger that the other types of pollution — especialy dust, would be very important. Certainly, during the daytime, sunlight scattering off dust makes it difficult to see distant mountains or hills. But at night, with no lights, the stars are surprisingly easy to see, even under dusty conditions.
I learned this while working in Dakar, Senegal, the Summer of 1974. We lived near Dakar-Yoff airport, because we were flying research aircraft over the Atlantic to study the weather. During the day, the sky on fair-weather days was quite hazy from all the dust in the air. This dust came from the dry ground nearby (it was quite dry) and from the Sahara desert just to the north. At night, though, the stars shone brilliantly. If it wasn’t raining or cloudy, we could see the Milky Way Galaxy.
I hope that you have a good place to go to — once in a while — to just look up at the night sky and see the stars.
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