Celestial Nights

For myself, I declare I don't know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream . . . Vincent Van Gogh

This past winter, I noticed an unusual number of evenings on which stargazing was difficult. I like to spot Orion (and maybe one or two others) when I look up past the roofs and treetops, but there seemed to be few opportunities to do so. I wondered at first if we were just having a lot of haze or clouds, but then it dawned on me: there are so many more lights around here than there used to be.

Whether it's good news or bad news depends on how you look at it, I guess. A new, brightly illuminated parking lot, extra lights from a large construction project, a well lit and expanding medical facility . . . all of these are in my near vicinity, signs that I'm living in a dynamic area. Certainly, it's no backwater. There are as many as three road and utility projects ongoing in addition to the other construction. I haven't moved, but the world seems to be beating a path to my door. Once the road is finished, there will probably be even more lights, making the neighborhood safer (we presume), busier, and less shadowy, and yet . . there will probably be fewer stars.

One of the great compensations of winter has always been the brilliance of the stars on clear, frosty nights, and no matter what the time of year, there's usually something to see: a planet or two, the rising moon, or some passing clouds, faintly luminous against the blue darkness. We don't see nearly as many stars here as I remember observing as a kid in semi-rural Florida--there, the sky was awash in them, the Milky Way a familiar sight. And yet my current neighborhood used to be a nice enough place to watch the more limited number of constellations available to us here.

I even stood in line to see Mars through a telescope once, in the park, some years ago, when that planet was especially close to the Earth, a lovely evening when astronomy, neighborhood camaraderie, and whimsy coalesced (when I looked through the telescope, Mars was the exact color of an orange popsicle, the perfect tint for a warm summer night). I can't imagine another such occasion ever being repeated. It's hard for me to imagine now that it ever happened, but it did.

The last time I actually remember seeing the Milky Way was more than a dozen years ago, when I was visiting a friend in a rural Northern Kentucky county. The sky was glittering with stars that evening, much as I remembered it looking when I was young, and, yes, the environs were pitch dark, almost spooky. You actually wanted a streetlight or two just to show you where you were--we urban dwellers are accustomed to a baseline of illumination--but one or two would have been enough. Illumination shouldn't be blinding.

I was enchanted once by a painting I saw displayed in an exhibition of Latino artists, in which two young girls sat on the roof of a house gazing at the stars. Visible through a window inside was an older woman, presumably mom, going about her business in a quiet way. The scene depicted a perfect balance between the yearning and adventurousness of life yet to be lived and the anchoring security of family and home. I've often had something like that feeling, scanning the sky as I walked to my building from my car--or I used to, before these latter days of light pollution descended in a blaze upon us.

I've sometimes dreamed about having a house with a little viewing area for a telescope, so that I could look at whatever celestial wonders there were to see whenever I wanted, but being more of a town person than a country one, I know that this wish might be difficult to translate into reality (though you never know). I try to think about the changes in my current neighborhood as progress, but I have to admit . . . I miss the poetry of those evenings of pre-industrial strength lighting. I'm all for practicality, but it's always nice to leave a little room for enchantment. So are we really any better off, or is there just more "stuff" around us? Is trading glimpses of the night sky for parking lots and stadium seats a good trade or a bad one?