How stargazing connects us…

Milky Way at the Lava Mountain peaks.                  Ansel Adams Wilderness

One of my earliest memories is of the stars. I don’t remember the details. I was 4. My two sisters and I were swaddled in blankets and huddled together on the hood of my dad’s old brown Chevy Citation. He was sitting in a camping chair smoking cigarettes, back when he still smoked, back when he still sported a solo ’stache. The only light I can recall is from the glowing embers at the end of the butt.

That, and the stars. More stars than I can remember ever seeing, though perhaps that’s because I was only 4, and everything seemed bigger. We had gone out to watch a meteor shower — maybe the Geminids, given how cold it was, though it just as easily could have been the Perseids on a chilly western Washington summer night. I’m not sure where we were, though I like to imagine we were parked on top of a grassy hill, or out in the middle of a field.

Truthfully, I’m not even sure if this is a memory, or a dream that my 4-year-old self thought was real. I certainly don’t remember ever seeing so many stars again. Western Washington — especially along the heavily populated I-5 strip, where I spent most of my life — lacks good conditions for stargazing. Too many lights, too many clouds, too many trees, too low an elevation. I did not see the Milky Way until I was 25, driving through the deserts of the American Southwest.

I’m not alone. Eighty percent of Americans and a third of people around the world can no longer see the Milky Way, according to a global atlas of light pollution released in June by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Italy’s Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute. If you look at the atlas, you can see that western Washington is a big blob of red and yellow, a concentrated source of light pollution. And as the region’s population continues to soar, and as people move to the suburbs and exurbs to escape the booming Seattle real estate market, that blob is likely to grow.

It’s hard to quantify the importance of dark skies and of stargazing. An astronomer at Kitt Peak Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, tried to explain it to me this past summer. He says there should be a public right to view the night sky, that the Milky Way has been a cultural, spiritual, even technological part of civilization for millennia. There’s something real and yet hard to describe to be gained from looking at a truly dark sky uninhibited by light pollution — perhaps an essential piece of humanity. Who knows what exactly? Not me. Not my dad. Not even the astronomer I spoke to, who had dedicated his life to the subject. And not even Kermit the Frog, who sang: “What’s so amazing / That keeps us stargazing / And what do we think we might see?” Yet we still keep looking up.

By Zachariah Bryan