In defense of darkness
Megan Eaves-Egenes grew up under the very starry skies of rural New Mexico. During those years, she developed a deep appreciation for astronomy.
The fascination is, of course, not hers alone. But, a starry sky requires one pretty important ingredient: darkness. One study recently reported that since 2011, the night sky has gotten brighter at about 10% per year.
All that light pollution has brought dire consequences to life on planet earth. Crickets can’t tell whether it’s day or night, bird migrations have gone haywire, and our own natural alarm clocks are constantly confused.
In a world where switching on a lamp during evening hours is, as Megan writes, “almost as basic as breathing” is there hope for our night skies? Or have we illuminated our way to a point of no return?
Featuring Megan Eaves-Egenes.
Light pollution seen in Switzerland. (Unsplash)
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
You can order a copy of Megan’s book Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness on her website.
Want to plan travel around dark sky locations? Dark Sky International offers a variety of guides and tips on how to visit darky sky locations responsibly.
There are many popular stargazing apps. Megan uses SkyView, but also recommends Stellarium or SkySafari.
Learn more about the role satellites play in light pollution from our 2024 episode, “The new space race.”
Made nearly 10 years ago, here is our episode about light pollution emitted from a New Hampshire greenhouse.
SUPPORT
To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Felix Poon, Jessica Hunt, and Justine Paradis
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby.
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, Airae, Chris Zabriskie, Lennon Hutton, and Caro Luna.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
The Bortle Scale is a nine-level scale that measures sky brightness. What does your backyard look like? (Wikimedia / CC BY 4.0)
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. When travel writer Megan Eves-Egenes was growing up in rural New Mexico, she had free rein. She’d play hide-and-go seek in dried-out river beds or come up with elaborate make-believe-games behind her house. But once the sun set, a pretty important rule kicked in.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: During the day, you can go run around, do whatever you want… but at night we weren't allowed out at all.
[MUX IN, Starlight Corps]
Nate Hegyi: It’s not that Megan’s parents were super strict. They were just clear-eyed that if you’re living in a remote place… it gets… dark.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: I don't think I was afraid, afraid of it, but I was certainly like, I know why I'm not supposed to go outside. It wasn't the darkness that was the problem, really, or the fear.
Nate Hegyi: We’re talking no streetlights, no neighbors. Just a single outdoor light attached to Megan’s front door… which wasn’t even turned on most of the time. With that darkness, came danger.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: That is the time when you would have scorpions and mountain lions and coyotes.
Nate Hegyi: But, to every rule there’s an exception. A few times a year, Megan’s dad would wheel out a huge telescope and invite her outside.
[DESERT AMBI FADES IN]
Nate Hegyi: They’d look through the lens, trying to see the moons of Saturn, or catch a glimpse of a comet.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: We saw, you know, the Milky Way overhead… I mean, one year, I think we even saw the northern lights this far south, which was amazing.
Nate Hegyi: These are some of Megan’s favorite childhood memories. She learned to love the stars.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: You know these stars have been up there shining their light for millennia or more than that, all, all of time. And whatever is happening in my day to day that's stressing me out is really not that big a deal.
[MUX FADES OUT]
Nate Hegyi: Humans have been feeling this kind of awe and wonder at the night sky for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes, civilizations on opposite sides of the world … would notice and name the same constellations. Take Megan’s favorite…
Megan Eaves-Egenes: It's not actually technically a constellation. It's called an asterism, which is an unofficial star cluster, but it's called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. And it's this little group of stars that kind of resembles a tornado.
Nate Hegyi: In South America, it’s called the Honeycomb. In New Zealand, it’s Matariki. And then there’s the Japanese, whose name for this astrocluster is probably something you recognize. Subaru.
[MUX FADES IN, All Parts Equal]
Nate Hegyi: That’s right. One of the most popular car brands in the world is named after our night sky. It’s even on their logo.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Once you start seeing Subaru's around town, then you can't unsee. It's all the little seven stars. It's great.
Nate Hegyi: For thousands of years, being able to see a starry sky was as dependable as the sun rising. But not any more. For most people in 2026 access to this wonder is disappearing. 80 percent of the world is now under light polluted skies.That fact has become an obsession of Megan’s life.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: For most people on earth, there is just not a truly dark night… that’s basically disappeared and it's happened within a generation.
Nate Hegyi: Today on Outside/In, the story of how our cities became so bright… and whether in 2026 it’s even possible to preserve a night sky. Our producer Marina Henke spoke to Megan to find out . Stick around.
[MUX FADES W/ DESERT NOISES]
AD BREAK
Marina Henke: From NHPR this is Outside/In. I’m Marina Henke. For the 300,000 years humans have been on planet earth, we have existed alongside darkness. For Western civilizations, it hasn’t necessarily been an agreeable relationship.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: That's what I found in my research, is that there's definitely a divide, at least in kind of traditional viewpoints or philosophies around what darkness means, how we talk about darkness, what meaning we assign to it.
Marina Henke: Travel writer and dark-sky enthusiastic Megan Eaves-Egenes. She’s the author of the new book Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: In English, I mean, we have these, like, you can write a whole dictionary of words that are related in some way to darkness, that kind of associate darkness with something bad.
[MUX IN, Endearing Curl]
Marina Henke: You are leaving me in the dark!
Megan Eaves-Egenes: A dark cloud on the horizon.
Marina Henke: It was a dark time.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Wow that is a dark movie.
Marina Henke: Darkness is what superheroes save people from…
CLIP: The night is darkest just before the dawn
Marina Henke:Where villains show their face…
CLIP: Come out, come out wherever you arrrrreee.
Marina Henke: And where evil creatures jump out and scare us.
CLIP: Now give us a big loud roar!!! (Applause)
Marina Henke: Superheroes be damned, Megan desperately wants to change this narrative. Because for her, darkness is associated with something really important: a starry night sky. But for as long as we’ve had darkness we’ve also had light. And light? Well it’s winning the war, for better and for worse.
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: Three centuries ago, most urban streets were incredibly dark. Take London – one of the biggest cities in the world at the start of the 1800s. Even with oil-lit torches available, it was impossible to keep flames ignited on all the city’s empty streets. Instead, the wealthy would take advantage of a pretty unique profession for the time: they were called “link boys.”
Megan Eaves-Egenes: You had a system of young men who were employed by well -to-do people who wanted to go out at night, maybe to eat or drink or go somewhere. And they would actually carry a torch in front of these people and walk them home
Marina Henke: Some summer job, right?
[MUX IN, Brer Krille]
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Basically the first industrial scale artificial light at night was installed in factories during the industrial revolution. So that for the first time in history, human beings could be put to work during the hours when they would naturally be sleeping.
Marina Henke: In 1805 at Phillips & Lee cotton mill in Manchester, 50 gas-powered lights flickered on. Beyond increasing productivity, these gas-powered lights meant no open flames or a constant sourcing of candles. And they were just brighter. Inside the mill, it took 900 lights to illuminate what had required 2,500 candles.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: that quickly spread outside of factories, towards homes and then onto our streets.
Marina Henke: Advancements in illuminated light continued rapidly over the next few decades. In 1879, physicist Joseph Swan used newly invented electric bulbs to light up a busy shopping street in Newcastle, England.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: And then it followed right after that, already in the 1880s to London and Paris and then in LA as well.
Marina Henke: Imagine a map of the world’s streets lighting up one by one. 1887! Argentina! 1889, Lisbon! 1904, Sydney! From street lights, to office buildings, gymnasiums to doctors offices.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: And once we figured out how to do that, we've just added more and more and more and more and more.
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: All this electric light wasn’t actually universally popular at first. When one Scottish author saw Paris’ first electric lamp he penned this scathing review.
ARCHIVAL VOICE: Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums.
Marina Henke: It was…
ARCHIVAL VOICE: … “a horror to heighten horror.”
[MUX IN, Woodbird Theme]
Marina Henke: But, the spread of electricity was like a bright, blinking snowball careening down a mountain side. No amount of cranky candle-loving authors would be able to get in its way. And as every new light flickered on… a lit bit of nighttime darkness disappeared.
Marina Henke: Big broad question but what is the state of natural night in 2026?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: It’s a big question but it actually has quite a straightforward answer. And that is the night in 2026 is shrinking… measurably and very quickly at this point. There was a study done in 2023 that was published in the journal Science, which found that the night sky is getting brighter at about 10% per year, which is honestly almost unfathomable to have that kind of more light year on year!
Marina Henke: It’s a little hard to imagine. But picture a baby born in the suburbs of a medium-sized city. It’s late, they’re fussy, and their parents take them outside, where they can see about 250 stars. 18-years later and that baby has become a teenager. One night, they crawl out onto their roof – definitely not up to anything nefarious – and look up at the same sky. They now would only see 100 stars. This, by the way, is already WAY MORE than most people in cities can see. Where Megan lives in London she can usually make out about 4 stars in her backyard. If she could turn off every single light in the city…
[LIGHTS FLICKER OFF]
….she would be able to see about 5,000.
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: What’s blocking Megan’s view is formally called “sky glow.” You probably recognize it as the yellow-ish haze that clouds a city sky at night. Sky glow is especially bad in cities because, well… duh… there’s a lot of lights in cities – but also because of air pollution, which is really just lots of tiny particles hanging in the air. City lights hit those particles, bounce off of them, and keep ricocheting their way around the atmosphere. But this yellow, hazy pollution doesn’t stay in city limits. Light travels. In Death Valley National Park visitors trying to star gaze will see sky glow from Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: So for most people on earth, there is just not a truly dark night, not one where you can see the Milky Way, where you can see stars, where you can see meteor showers, the natural night, um, that's basically disappeared and it's happened within a generation.
[MUX IN, Jadie Grange]
Marina Henke: Although few want to see electric light while visiting Death Valley, they are pretty compelling reasons to illuminate a city. Say, I dunno, keeping airport runways lit, directing patients to hospital. But, the negative effects of evening light are pretty hard to ignore. And Megan thinks nothing illuminates ;) those effects better than one creature: the moth.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: I’ve just gotten kind of interested in moths through my research. Because they're one of these creatures, a bit like bats who are in a similar position. Um, they've just got really bad PR people!
Marina Henke: Well consider me got by the Anti-Moth PR Machine. Their flappy little wings, the way that when you’re in a tent, they just get right up in your zone. Acckh! Of course, it is not actually me they’re interested in, it’s my headlamp.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Essentially moths use the moon and stars to find their way and navigate. And when they come across a light bulb that's open and on at night, they basically kind of think it's the moon and they just start circling it, thinking that they're going in the right direction to get away from the moon. And they get trapped.
Marina Henke: Yeah I'm imagining right now, like I'm using my phone for GPS and suddenly it’s “Turn left. No turn right. No, it's 0.5 miles. No, it's 25 miles!” I mean, that would run havoc on my ability to, to navigate.
[GOOGLE MAPS VOICE]: In 500 feet take a le– take the exi– recalculating – take the exi – take a lef – recalculating.
Marina Henke: At sports games as a teenager, I remember looking up with some combination of awe and disgust at the sheer volume of moths doing this dance around our stadium lights. I don’t think I realized what a gruesome thing I was watching.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: They're not doing that because they're dumb! They're doing it because they're completely confused. And then they circle and circle and circle until they either bash themselves against that light bulb and get burned, or they simply exhaust themselves and fly there to their death.
Marina Henke: In the past 50 years, the global population of moths has fallen by a third. Light pollution was one of the main culprits.
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: Moths aren’t the only animals affected by our extraordinarily overlit world. 60 percent of invertebrates are nocturnal. And most of them depend on the moon in some way for navigation. Fireflies courtship dances are getting disrupted, crickets can’t tell whether it’s day or night, and bird migrations have gone haywire. The news for us humans isn’t much better. And a lot can be blamed on one specific lighting technology.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: LED is a new form of lighting technology. It's called light emitting diodes. And it's... it's a different technology than our old incandescent light bulbs. It's far more efficient, which means it can produce a lot more light with a lot less energy.
[MUX IN, Kettletopper]
Marina Henke: More light, for less energy. Sounds like a good thing, right? But there’s a downside. In 2011, the global LED market made up less than 1 percent of general lighting. By 2019 that number had grown to 47. Your TV is lit by LEDs. Your car headlights. Your phone. And recently, our streetlights. For years streetlights in the US was primarily lit with a technology called high-pressure sodium lamps. Don’t worry about it. What you would recognize them by is that orange-y glow, which a surprising number of people on the internet are INCREDIBLY nostalgic for.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: These newer LED lights are very not just bright, but white blue end of the spectrum light.
Marina Henke: Yeah these are the ones like when I'm driving on the highway sometimes right now they legitimately look blue at night. These are LEDs, right?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, that is literally true because light kind of falls on a spectrum. And the LEDs are on one far end of the blue spectrum, which is the more harmful end in terms of our health.
Marina Henke: Consistent exposure to LED lighting has been shown to reduce sleep quality and seriously disrupt our body’s natural alarm clock . LED street lights are 5 times more powerful in affecting circadian rhythms than the sodium lights they replaced. It’s not just LEDS though that are causing us problems though. A 2024 study in the Journal of Environmental Pollution showed that exposure to nighttime light in general, was associated with a 21% higher risk of cardiometabolic diseases like heart attacks and strokes. Some clinicians have begun to consider that the simple act of avoiding light at night could be treated as a serious non-pharmacological intervention for mental health disorders.
[MUX FADES]
Marina Henke: Of course, the flip side of it is, you know, we've found that darkness does us well. What does darkness give us?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: I mean, the more I have studied this and the more time I have spent in the dark, the more convinced I am that we really need darkness and not just for our physical health, but for our emotional health and for our spiritual health. If you have a spiritual practice, It's a time for us to self reflect.
[MUX IN, Sherman]
Megan Eaves-Egenes: And also it's a sense of looking at the night sky as a way of getting perspective on our size. It gives us this idea that we're both tiny, insignificant, and also giant.
Marina Henke: What Megan’s describing here is a feeling of awe. It’s an emotion that psychologists take seriously. And sure, maybe that’s a cliche. But feel awe like this enough and it reduces people’s stress, lessens inner critiques and can inspire acts of selflessness. Looking up at a clear night sky can make you feel like part of something bigger. So… when we come back… what can we do about light pollution… without going back to the dark ages.
AD BREAK
Marina Henke: From NHPR this is Outside/In, I’m Marina Henke. While working on this story, I’ve been paying extra attention to light at night. I’ve noticed skyglow. I’ve seen some very unhappy moths. But, there’s something else that’s hard to ignore. Humans tend to find a lot of joy during evening hours. Usually that joy involves light.
Marina Henke: As a night sky enthusiast, as someone who has worked a lot on the many negatives that we have of not having a natural night. What do you think about the idea that like, there are people who are overjoyed in a New York City skyline, right? Or I was thinking for me, like some of my most cherished memories, probably as a teenager as playing field hockey under really bright stadium lighting. Um… how do you balance that? How do you think of the benefits of an illuminated night?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Well, I mean, there's no question at all in my mind or I think anybody's mind that light is beautiful.
[MUX BEAT]
Megan Eaves-Egenes: We're attracted to light and our eyes are just sort of I don't know if they're designed, but they're evolved in a certain way to kind of see light in a certain way, we see a different spectrum of light than other creatures can see. We see a lot more types of light than a lot of creatures can see. And we see it in a different way. And that's beautiful. Not something that we should hate or dislike. For me, it's all about balance and coming to find a way that is… that allows us to experience that beauty and that charm and the nightlife that we want to have in our cities, and also the important nighttime jobs and roles that people do at night that require lighting.
[CLIPS FADE IN… A SOCCER GOAL BEING SCORE DURING AN EVENING GAME, FIREWORKS, THE LIGHTING OF A CHRISTMAS TREE]
Marina Henke: One of Megan’s colleagues once framed the necessity of light in a way that’s always stuck with her.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: You know, it's a bit like this. Ambulances with their sirens are actually a form of noise pollution. They're extremely loud, they're disruptive, they're disruptive for a reason. But we need that noise because that's life saving for somebody. So that's a form of noise pollution that we're willing and gladly take on in our environment. And the same thing we need to sort of have that balanced view towards light.
[MUX FADES OVER GRAF]
Marina Henke: If an occasional ambulance siren is a form of noise pollution most people are willing to put up with, imagine a fire-station that decided to allow their sirens to run 24/7. That’s how out-of-balance Megan thinks we are with our light use.
Marina Henke: You describe yourself at one point as a light waste grump. Um, what is, what is light waste?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: So I… a good, I think a good way to compare this is actually our use of plastic, right? So there are probably a million ways that plastic is so useful to us. It is a great technology. It has immeasurably changed human history and life on this planet and helped us in so many ways. And also we use it way too much, and we put it in places where it shouldn't be. And so there’s that point where it’s like at what point is this too much?
Marina Henke: Dark Sky International estimates that about 30% of outdoor light is wasted. That could be light that’s shining onto something nobody’s looking at, think of backyard mood lighting, or spilling out wayyy past the area it’s intended to illuminate, like an unshielded greenhouse.When I asked Megan for her classic example of light waste, she pointed to something oddly specific.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: in the UK we have all these shops that have real estate signs in them…
Marina Henke: Like I said, niche.
[MUX IN, Base Camp]
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Real estate agents do not work at night, but they put their shop windows full of listings and then light them up insanely bright. And so it's so that people walking by will stop and look at them. But nobody at 9 p.m. is going to stop and look at like a house listing on a random street.
Marina Henke: Once you start looking for the real estate listing versions of light waste you will not be able to stop. There’s my neighbor’s computer screen saver that flickers all night through an open window on my block, the university building down the street that doesn’t seem to turn off a singular light at night.
Marina Henke: I'm imagining you walking through your hometown of London very grumpy some nights.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: It's hard because once you start… you know, I never thought in my earlier life that I would be so obsessed with light bulbs. But here we are. And, you know, now I walk around and I just see… God! There's… when you start looking around your environment at how many light fixtures there are, it starts to become overwhelming!
[MUX UP]
Marina Henke: But in a moment when trying to solve different environmental crises can sometimes feel like a very grim game of whack-a-mole, Megan is actually more optimistic than you might think.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: It's not that we don't have the solutions, we already have the solutions. The issue is having awareness among people generally, and then having the impetus for it to be done both politically and at a kind of infrastructural level.
Marina Henke: Reason number for the optimism 1? The technology.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: The great thing is that now LED technology has evolved and is currently still evolving. LEDs can come in different color temperatures, we can put filters on them to change the color temperature. We can install different types of smart lighting, which can be dimmed or work on motion sensors. There was a really fascinating trial that they did in a small suburb outside of Paris where they reinstalled the lighting on a couple of blocks of houses, I guess, and the residents could… they were all given an app on their smartphone, and they could literally control their own streetlights on those streets. And they found that they reduced their light use by half
Marina Henke: But it doesn’t necessarily take a fancy pilot program to take advantage of these new technologies. Night sky advocates will tell you there are changes you can make to your lighting… today! Especially because even though we’ve talked a lot about street lighting, most pollution comes from buildings – including the ones we live in.
[MUX IN: Window Weepin’]
Megan Eaves-Egenes: So there are some really easy things that people can do around their homes and in their communities that will make a difference immediately number one thing close your curtains… close your blinds. If you've got a skylight or a roof window, make sure that has a covering on it at night.
Marina Henke: Megan recommends taking a light audit. You’d be amazed what fixtures you’ve completely forgotten exist.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: So you want them pointed down. You want them to be a warmer color temperature. And ideally you'd want them on some kind of a motion sensor or timer so that they're off when you're not using them.
Marina Henke: Outdoor fixtures should have what are called “light shields.” Imagine a little hat for your lamp. They help minimize sky glow and also remove sharp glares – which ironically can impede our ability to see at night. These light shields, and timers, and new bulbs are making their way into actual law. Maine just passed its first light pollution bill, which requires all publicly funded lighting to adhere to a new set of pollution-conscious standards. This includes enforcing warmer-toned LEDs, which means you’re still getting cheaper energy without compromising health.
[MUX OUT]
Marina Henke: The second case for optimism is the simplicity of light pollution cleanup.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Light doesn't have any residue. So when you turn off a light or stop using it, the problem is simply solved
Marina Henke: Megan compared this to say, addressing microplastics – totally a worthy problem, but a tricky one. Even if we stopped making plastic today, our landfills, our oceans… heck our bodies… are still full of this stuff. Dark sky advocates argue this is literally as simple as the flip of a switch.
[FLICK OF A SWITCH]
[PAUSE]
Marina Henke: Much of dark sky discourse is pretty easy to support. I mean who doesn’t love a starry sky? But when talking about light pollution there’s one pretty big elephant in the room. Before reporting this story, the one fact I thought I knew about urban lighting was that more streetlights meant less crime. Isn’t darkness actually more dangerous?
Megan Eaves-Egenes: I mean, this is such a, this is such an emotionally charged topic for people. And it is, um, something we have to talk about very carefully because this is something people feel very strongly about. And actually, there's not a lot of hard evidence that crime goes up in dark hours or in dark spaces.
Marina Henke: The evidence Megan’s referring to here comes from a groundbreaking publication printed in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. It’s been replicated in several other communities.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Most crime is committed during the day. That's point blank, the right statistic. So we can't say that more crime happens at night. We also can't really say that things like street lighting actually reduce the number of traffic accidents because statistically they don't.
[MUX IN, So It Goes ALT]
Marina Henke: Of course, what makes this an emotionally charged topic isn’t the traffic accidents or the burglaries. Many women report feeling fear walking down a dark city street at night. I’ll be honest, I’m one of them! Megan isn’t trying to discount that feeling. Although she doesn’t think darkness is necessarily what’s to blame.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: So lighting is something that we use for our own eyes and for our own comfort and comfort. Emotionally is the most important part of that. It's about how we feel, not necessarily what is true And so, you know, this idea that dark alleys are dangerous and all that sort of stuff, it's because we feel more vulnerable in the dark And that is what leads us to think that the dark isn't safe.
Marina Henke: Megan writes in her book, “If darkness was the problem Las Vegas should be the safest city on earth.” She’s being a little glib but I get her point there. Several researchers have found that increasing feelings of safety at night has a lot to do with gradiating light rather than having some places intensely illuminated bordered by sudden darkness. Other considerations include minimizing glare – again a symptom of overlighting – and constructing public spaces in a way that doesn’t leave narrow walkways or tight turns. Basically, even though safe cities don’t need to be lit up like Times Square, nobody’s arguing that they should be pitch black.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: That’s not reasonable. We don't live in a society where that's even possible, and certainly not what I would recommend doing
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: For somebody so evangelical about darkness, Megan is actually more measured than I thought she’d be about this need to co-exist with electricity. But, she doesn’t think people living in cities need to count themselves out of finding joy in a starry sky.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Most people don't go outside and look up at night. Even when I'm walking around with friends in London just after the pub, I'm always like, “oh look, it's Venus!” or, “oh look, it's Jupiter!” And they're like, “What? You can see that? I didn't think we could see anything in London!” I'm like, “Yeah, we can! There! Look up!”
[MUX IN, Potted Plant, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: Look up. Urban stargazing could easily sound like an oxymoron. Megan would offer a different framing. No you are not going to be able to see the Milky Way. You may not even be able to make out a constellation. But, as long as you can see one star, you have the opportunity to tap into something else the cosmos can offer: a feeling of togetherness. Because that star you’re seeing is the same star Megan saw in New Mexico, or even that cranky author in Paris in 1881.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: It's amazing to me that I can go to Uzbekistan and stand in a mountain in Uzbekistan and talk about the sky with somebody. And we're both familiar with those stars… It puts us together as humans and takes away all of those borders and things that we think make us so different and reminds us that we're all the same. We're all here on planet earth, on the good spaceship earth, and we're all the same.
[MUX OUT]
[MUX IN, PARA CHARKIV]
Marina Henke: So we’re going to round out today’s show with some tips for the hopeful urban stargazer. Tip# 1: face the right direction.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: If you can find a place of open sky, if you're in a city that has tall buildings, you need to try to get somewhere that is the edge of that. So for example, if you're in New York, you want to get to one of the rivers.The best way to face is away from the center or the downtown area.
Marina Henke: Tip # 2: Pull out a stargazing app on your smartphone. Megan uses something called Skyview, but there’s lots of them out there. I gotta say these apps are so cool. They’ll orient you and identify the stars you’re looking at. And tip # 3: Consistency is key.
Megan Eaves-Egenes: Do it regularly enough throughout the course of a year, that you can start to see how the sky changes. Because for me, that's the coolest part, is when I see a certain star coming up in that time of year, I know the year is changing, time is passing, and it helps me feel connected to the rhythms of the cosmos.
[MUX BEAT]
Marina Henke: Okay mark my words I’m going to try this, I was saying to my editor I don’t live in New York City, I live in Portland ME, but we get sky glow! It’s light polluted!
Megan Eaves-Egenes: You can stargaze tonight no matter where you are! I stargaze in London. So I promise you you can do it anywhere.
[MUX MIXES WITH AMBI OF STARGAZING TAPE]
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: That’s it for today’s episode. Which was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke.
Marina Henke: Alright it is 10:29pm and I’m going to go look for some stars…
Nate Hegyi: It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt.
Marina Henke: Let’s see, I see one star, I see two…
Nate Hegyi: Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio.
Marina Henke: I see three, and four and five…
Nate Hegyi: Music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, Airae, Chris Zabriskie, Lennon Hutton, and Caro Luna.
Marina Henke: OH MY GOD is that the big dipper!
Nate Hegyi: You can learn more about Megan’s book Nightfaring at her website. We’ll link to it in our show notes.
Marina Henke: Alright I’m breaking out the app. It is telling me… it’s not… it’s telling me it’s part of Ursa Major. I can see… one… two… three… four… five… six… stars of that constellation. The rest… victims of light pollution.
Nate Hegyi: Also… today was focused on the light pollution that shines up from the earth’s surface. But, there’s also the light pollution that comes down from space… via satellites. We did a whole episode on that a couple years ago, it’s called “The New Space Race.” Again, we’ll link to that in our show notes.
Marina Henke: VIRGO helloooo! (Whispers)I thought that was a shooting star!
Nate Hegyi: Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Marina Henke: It’s peaceful out here. It’s not the middle of nowhere but it’s peaceful…
[MUX FADES]