Escaping light pollution: Stargazing is amazing in these places with dark skies
More than 99% of Americans live under skies polluted by light. This pervasive artificial glow obscures stars and the constellations they form.
It hides our galaxy, the Milky Way, from four in every five people living in the U.S. It disrupts our circadian rhythms, which dictate our sleep and wake cycles, and has a deleterious effect on plant and animal life. The astronomer Dr. David Koerner thinks it also affects our sense of place — in the universe.
“Seeing the galaxy in which you live, and understanding that it’s there, and understanding that your place in the world is not just your place among your work associates, or whatever,” he said. “It’s in this huge cosmos at large.”
Koerner, a retired Northern Arizona University professor, recently lived at the Grand Canyon for six weeks as the park’s astronomer-in-residence, a position created to promote dark sky education and awareness.
Grand Canyon National Park was named an International Dark Sky Park in 2019. To earn and keep the certification, it retrofitted thousands of lights to reduce glare and shine downward, and maintains a certain level of sky quality. It is among more than 145 dark sky places in the U.S., many of them concentrated in the southwest.
Some call these places home, or live under uncertified expanses of dark sky. But most only experience the full grandeur of an unpolluted night sky through a screen: a photo on social media, an episode of "Star Trek," the special effects of a science fiction film. But then they visit someplace where the sky is actually visible.
During Koerner’s stint at the North Rim, he was out stargazing with tourists when one woman, visiting from the east coast, was visibly astonished as she stared up at the sky.
“We can’t see any of this,” she said in wonder, “but it’s all there.”
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And to Koerner, it offers a view of deep time that is just as profound and moving as that found in the Grand Canyon.
“Deep time is three times longer in space than on Earth,” he said, “because the universe is three times as old.”
'A hell of a story'
Deep time was first conceptualized in the 18th century by the geologist James Hutton.
After observing rock formations along the Scottish coast, Hutton came to believe the Earth was much, much older than the 6,000 years that society imagined. He was particularly interested in unconformities: the meeting of rocks from different geological periods, indicating a break in time.
In 1788, the scientist John Playfair accompanied Hutton to one such unconformity, at Siccar Point, on the east coast of Scotland. “The mind seemed to grow giddy,” Playfair wrote afterward, “by looking so far into the abyss of time.”
It was deep time that drew Koerner to the Colorado Plateau.
Growing up in Long Beach, California, his parents adhered to a creationist view of the universe. But young Koerner caught glimpses of a different story. In particular, he was taken by a scene in the Disney film "Fantasia" that portrayed the scientific origins of the Earth and evolution. These conflicting versions created a puzzling cognitive dissonance.
He decided science offered the more alluring version of events, and the Colorado Plateau, with its ancient rock formations and dinosaur fossils, offered a tangible link to the past he was so fascinated with.
“It was just a place where you could touch very deep parts of time,” he said. “And sometimes people find that daunting and they would shy away from it. But for some reason it just grounded me.”
Koerner earned a Ph.D in astronomy after completing his undergraduate in physics and landed at Arizona State University in 2002. Now retired, his zeal for the area and for the story that captured his imagination all those years ago is undimmed.
He still marvels at the Big Bang, the fact the universe began from an expanding, hot, dense state of matter that turned into galaxies and stars and planets and life.
“I just think it's a hell of a story,” Koerner said. “I think it's better story than any of the ones that cultures have made. It still blows me away.”
In the dark, questions of life in the universe
Two hours after sunset, the rim was deserted. The crescent moon faintly illuminated the canyon’s highest peaks and spires, but most of the chasm was an inky black. All you could see were the tiny bobbing headlamps of hikers, journeying from rim to rim.
Above, deep time awaited.
Stars twinkled amid scattered clouds, the Milky Way visible through the gaps. Koerner beamed a laser pointer into the sky. There was the Summer Triangle: Vega, with its disk of dust; the fast-rotating Altair; and Deneb, believed to be more than 2000 light years away.
Deneb is huge, Koerner said. As in, its radius is roughly similar to the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
“If you put it where the sun is,” he added, “it would fill the entire sky.”
Is there a future for dark skies?
To the north, a bright streak flashed against the sky.
“Whoa,” Koerner said. “Did you see that?”
The blaze was brief, but so intense it was hard to miss. A shooting star?
“Well, it might have been a piece of space junk,” he said.
Humanity's steady march into space is having an effect on astronomy. Space junk, Koerner said, is “an annoyance, and it’s getting worse.” Radio pollution is also an issue, produced in particular by satellites.
People increasingly talk about the democratization of space, the broad notion of opening up space travel beyond the likes of NASA astronauts.
“My thoughts are it's a big mess,” Koerner said. Then he laughed. “It’s so chaotic, and such a mess that I don’t have pronounced principles to stand by, because I feel like it’s all hopeless.”
It will be driven by special interests, he predicted, and hallmarked by an inability to cooperate. And while space tourism is one thing, mining and colonization of the moon and asteroids is another.
“It’s going to be extractive capitalism all over again,” he said. “And how will global governments deal with it?”
Back on Earth, most people can’t even see the night sky.
There is hope, even for heavily light-polluted areas. National parks and preserves are natural dark sky candidates, but that doesn't mean it's impossible elsewhere. The Fountain Hills neighborhood in sprawling metropolitan Phoenix, for instance, is a certified dark sky place. The rise of astrotourism — people traveling to places specifically for their dark skies — indicates a growing awareness of what we cannot see.
“What we all hope is that it will spill over into urban and suburban areas,” Koerner said. “Even though they're developed and populated, they don't need to be as light polluted as they are.”
In the end, we're left with the draw of artificial light: It can illuminate — and darken — at will.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Dark skies free of light pollution can still be found at Grand Canyon
