A fascinating article about the night sky from 2007. I linked to it then, but it wasn’t available for free online. It is now. First, this excerpt:
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 lights 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.’ “
That’s one of the things about living out in the desert that makes it worth all the inconveniences, troublesome bugs, and so on…. we have totally dark skies. Sometimes I can see a glow on the horizon of the southern skies from a town 40 miles away or so, but it doesn’t effect the skies overhead. I love being able to see the stars so clearly, the Milky Way, and all the passing satellites.