Some of the Darkest Skies in the U.S. are in Danger
Here is one of my favorite recent images from Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Image Credit: Astronomy Picture of the Day
The above picture was taken in Death Valley, California and is one of the few remaining places in the U.S. where the stars are so bright and numerous, they literally take your breath away.
When I was in the military, once a year we would train in the Mojave Desert, a place very much like Death Valley (pictured above). I remember while on guard duty in the middle of the night not being able to find even the brightest of constellations because of all the stars.
There’s probably no more amazing experience than to see a sky completely filled with stars. Those places are becoming more and more rare.
Please, do what you can everyone, turn off a light, willya?
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POSTED IN: Astronomy Porn, light pollution
1 opinion for Some of the Darkest Skies in the U.S. are in Danger
Elizabeth Anne Middleton
Oct 27, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I grew up on a farm in the Flint Hills region of Kansas. It was magical to look up to the sky at night and see all the stars.
Astronomy has always been a fascinating subject for me; although my studies were music at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, I took an astronomy 101 course with Professor David van Berklom (I hope I spelled his name right!). He was a great teacher who made the class interesting with all kinds of witty comments about the stars and celestial bodies. Because my math background was so negligible, and because it had been years since high school algebra, he allowed me to write a paper in lieu of taking the hour exams for the class. I read dozens of books about astronomy and wrote a 100-page paper in three parts, describing 1) our solar system, 2) star classifications, and 3) types of bodies found in the universe, such as nebulae, galaxies, etc, for first and second grade level. I went to the Hebrew School in Springfield, Massachusetts, and gave a class in astronomy, and then asked the class to draw pictures to illustrate the paper. They drew wonderful pictures of the planets with all of their moons and rings, different shapes of constellations in the universe and exciting things like black holes sucking up objects.
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