One of the perks of these long, hot days is once the sun finally gives us a break from slow-roasting us, the night sky becomes a Van Gogh painting, a collage of constellations and stars, a never-ending cosmic ballet showing off its colours. Looking up, you really get an idea of just how vast space really is and how massive the sky is above our heads. A performance of unimaginable energy stretching into eternity.
It's very easy to get caught up nowadays in a world stuffed full of artificial lighting, constantly huddling by the glow of a light bulb or the blue light of a screen, to the point where we end up washing out any sort of darkness. Every time a new housing estate is built, it is immediately covered in streetlights, house lights and outdoor lights before the gardens are filled with solar-lit mushrooms and peeing gnomes. It’s getting to the point where one day, we won’t be able to look up and see the ethereal artwork being put on display by the cosmos, and the sky will become nothing more than a washed-out dark nothingness.
This is something that really worries me, because I am a massive space nerd. I follow all the latest space news, and when there’s a rocket launching, more than likely I’ll have it on my phone whilst I’m working. Most of all, though, I love stargazing. You can read about space or watch programmes about it, but you can’t get any rawer than sitting outside, looking up into the seemingly endless abyss overhead. I love lying in the garden on a warm late summer's evening with an ice-cold cider in hand, staring up at the clear sky and just letting my mind wander. I love watching as satellites zip overhead, nothing more than a silent dot of light hurrying across the night sky. Look up long enough and you’re bound to see a shooting star, some being nothing more than a wisp of light, a quick flash, and others that go on forever, lighting up the sky and leaving a beautiful glowing tail across the darkness.
But what happens when one day you look up, and there's just... nothing?
Not because the stars have disappeared. They're still there, putting on the same breathtaking show they always have. It would have just gotten to the point where we’ve built so many homes and fitted so many lights that we've finally drowned out the night sky. Every single new streetlight, floodlight and porch light is slowly adding to the already massive amount of light pollution glaring into the night sky, taking away the darkness until eventually it will never really get dark anymore.
I do wonder if many people realise just how much we've already lost. There are people who've gone their whole lives without seeing the Milky Way or the faint cluster of white smudges of other galaxies. To them, a night sky with twenty stars in it is being washed out because when they look up, they look directly into an LED streetlight, and the only way they can really see the night sky properly is in a planetarium. The slow creeping glow of light pollution is most apparent when it's cloudy, because you can see the light from beneath reflecting off the base of the cloud. You shouldn’t be able to see clouds at night. The next time you’re looking out from a hilltop of coastline at night, look towards the closest big town or city, then look up above it, and you’ll see what I mean. The clouds above will be glowing.
Even in the absolute depths of the middle of nowhere, where the sky is largely untouched by artificial light, the stargazing experience is slowly being interrupted by the things we've already launched just beyond the thin layer of varnish we call an atmosphere. With thousands of satellites now orbiting the Earth, busy beaming 4K AI-generated cat videos to your phone in the middle of nowhere, they're also reflecting sunlight back towards us. It's not the same as a streetlight flooding the sky with an artificial glow, but it is adding to the already increasing issue. For me, I really feel like we need to rethink the way we light our streets, the way we light factories and even whole cities. Use outdoor lighting only when it's needed, point it towards the ground rather than the sky, and think twice before adding yet another light to the garden. They're tiny changes, but if enough of us make them, they'll add up.
So, next time you find yourself outside on a clear evening, take five minutes. Turn the garden lights off, switch off the colour-changing toadstools, let your eyes adjust and simply look up. Find a constellation, watch a satellite drift silently overhead or, if you're lucky, catch a shooting star racing across the sky.
The greatest work of art humanity has ever seen was never painted, sculpted or built. It has always been just above our heads. It would be a shame if we were the generation that turned the lights on and forgot to look at it.