The Night Sky

August 18, 2007

We took time out from being dazzled by the Mammoth night sky to be equally dazzled by David Owen's superb piece in the Aug. 20 New Yorker, dealing with ... the night sky.

"To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru."

We'd argue that the Eastern Sierra ranks right up there, which is why the Night Sky ordinance that the town has put in place is so critical.

Here's Owen again:

"Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats and, increasingly, deprives many of us with a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery and plain old jaw-dropping wonder."

Well, duh!

Up here in Mammoth we know that. We understand that. Somehow, not enough of us get it, though. "Security lights," which almost never work for their intended purposes, are proliferating around town, which is why the ordinance was crafted in the first place.

Here's Owen again:

"My friend Ken Daniel is a lighting designer. About a decade ago, he told me something that changed the way I think about the night. It was early evening , and we were sitting with some other people in an unelectrified barn on Martha's Vineyard and looking out at the ocean, and he observed that we were doing something that Americans almost never do anymore: watching it get dark.

"In the early nineteen-nineties, Daniel worked in Los Angeles and he and his family lived in Glendale. His wife, Gina, told me that the street slights and other lights in their neighborhood were so bright that their bedrooms never got fully dark at night, even though they had curtains.

"When the Northridge earthquake struck, in 1994, the first thing she noticed after the shaking had awakened her, was that she couldn't see.

"'The earthquake had knocked out the power all over the city, and everything was black,'" she said. "'When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbors standing in the street, looking up at the sky and saying 'Wow'."

Ain't we lucky, though? Up here, the night sky is a constant source of wonder and inspiration.

So turn off that danged light, OK? Dig the sky.

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