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The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it (www.space.com)

submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is "noctalgia." In general, it means "sky grief," and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

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[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Try in a small town. Seriously, tho villages are better. Go in the backroads, you'll have plenty of sky and stars to get lost in.

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

In densely populated areas you have to move quite far out to find such places. Like, check a light pollution map and then scroll into central Europe, like around the Netherlands and western Germany. It's all just a big red blob.

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[–] virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.

It varies depending on what country your in, but I don't think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you're in the US unless you're in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.

And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn't great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I'd say that's a worthy trade off.

Like a life saving drug with side effects, there's always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it's important we don't act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I’d say that’s a worthy trade off.

Those are not the satellites that are the problem. It's Starlink and other LEO satellites.

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