The Night Sky

This morning I saw something on Hacker News about how we are forgetting about darkness. I have complained about the local light pollution on here numerous times. When people have floodlights that are on all night and blind me inside our house. Not only that, but some of them are blinding from blocks away.

The same goes for car headlights. Don’t even get me started on that ridiculousness.

This article was about not being able to see the stars and Milky Way and things like that. I was able to experience both when I was a child. Growing up in the Philly suburbs, we had the usual light pollution and smog, so the sky was always too bright to see many stars.

Going to the mountains was the opposite, at least at one time. The bright areas were near the towns and cities. Mainly Hazleton was an area where the sky was bright, but most of the sky there was pretty black. Later, they built and, over the years, expanded an industrial park so the light increased to the north.

One of the wow moments in my life was being up there not too long after my last corneal transplant and seeing the individual stars and the Milky Way. Before that, I could only see the stars, save a few of the brightest ones, by looking through binoculars.

When I saw the stars without assistance, it blew my mind. Today it still does. It made me realize just how insignificant we are to the vast universe. I cannot see that stuff anymore with the failed cornea, but it was such a gift to have the chance to see that.

The vastness of the universe is so great that I don’t believe any of us can truly grasp it. We are part of that vastness but completely insignificant to it. We are just chemicals in ways that the laws of physics work together to create us.