The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

The moon tonight, a waning gibbous a few days past full, is bright enough that our view at the observatory won’t be as great as it otherwise might be. When, during its twenty-nine-day cycle, the moon is big enough and therefore bright enough to wipe so many stars from view, most astronomers are not excited to see it. But Berman seems genuinely delighted to roll back the roof of his DIY observatory (which he built, he says, “crazy and wrong”) and point his telescope at the moon. (“Did you make the telescope yourself?” I ask. “No, no, no,” he says. “I wanted a good one.”)

“Here, take a look at this,” he says, and invites me to step up to the eyepiece.

I am not prepared for what I see: the gray-white moon in a sea of black, its surface in crisp relief, brighter than ever before. I am struck, too, by the scene’s absolute silence. It is clearer, yes, brilliantly so, but this moon seems cold, antiseptic—alone in the unfathomable expanse of space. I learned a lot about the moon from Berman’s writing (“it’s more brilliant when it’s higher, when it’s nearer, and in winter when sunlight striking it is seven percent stronger”), and I appreciate this kind of information. But I think our relationship with the moon has more to it than simply astronomical facts. With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips dirt colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope the moon seems—ironically—farther away.

“So now we’ll go to Saturn,” Berman says. Using both arms, he moves the large white telescope as though leading a dancing partner, turning it slightly to the east, then steps up the ladder and adjusts the view. “Now we’re talking,” he says. When I look through the scope, though, the bright tiny object is dancing around, and the image is blurry. Berman takes another look and makes some more adjustments, explaining as he does the key elements for viewing the night sky: transparency, darkness, and “seeing.” Yes, that’s what they call it. “You would think astronomers would come up with a more technical term,” he chuckles, “but no, all around the world astronomers are saying, ‘The seeing is a three point five tonight.’” Seeing reflects the effect of turbulence in the earth’s atmosphere on the sharpness and steadiness of images—good seeing if the atmosphere is steady and calm, bad seeing if it is especially turbulent. A quick way to check seeing is how strongly stars twinkle: The more the twinkling, the worse the seeing. Berman tells me that bad seeing is one reason why no major observatories have been built east of the Mississippi for more than a century. The good “seeing” atop mountains in the desert has drawn astronomers west.

“Take a look at that,” says Berman, climbing down. “Wait for the moments of good seeing—when it steadies up.” Waiting for that—for good seeing—is exactly what an experienced observer will always do, he says. “I remember once when I was about twenty-four, and it was thirteen below zero, and my beard was frozen, I just stood there for three straight hours waiting for those moments when there would be steadiness and you could see ring within ring, detail that even photographs don’t show. That’s what observers have done for centuries.”

As I wait for good seeing, I think about what Berman’s just said. While humans have always watched the sky, modern astronomy has its origins in the lands we know as Egypt and Babylon, in the third and second millennia before Christ. People then were looking to the sky for signs and omens (though of course they were looking in other places, too; “the entrails of sheep were of special interest,” writes historian Michael Hoskin). Eventually, the cosmology that developed—the classic Earth-centered Greek model of the universe—would dominate Greek, Islamic, and Latin thought for two thousand years. During the Middle Ages, astronomy in Europe was truly in the Dark, and not in the way modern astronomers would like—we have Islamic astronomers to thank for keeping the craft alive. That’s the reason so many stars have Arabic names; one Islamic prince named Ulugh Beg, who lived from 1394 to 1449 in Samarkand in central Asia, catalogued over a thousand individual stars himself. And when, in 1609, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) turned his handmade telescopes toward the sky, human observation of the cosmos changed forever.

When the “seeing” settles and Saturn comes into view, I can’t help but say, “Oh my God!” To the naked eye Saturn is simply a bright starlike object—interesting, perhaps, but nothing more. But seen through a telescope it’s a soft yellow marble with wide, striated rings—exactly as in photographs, but this time alive.

“Over the years more than a thousand people have looked through that telescope,” Berman says. “And with Saturn, people always say one of two things. They either say, ‘Oh my God!’ or they say, ‘That’s not real!’”

That’s not real—what a curious response. I’ve had other astronomers tell me the same thing, or say that people will question whether the astronomer hasn’t placed an image of the planet into the telescope somehow. The fact that people are seeing something with their own eyes has incredible power—you can see photographs of Saturn a thousand times and be somewhat impressed, but see it for yourself and you don’t soon forget.

The most beautiful starry night I have ever seen was more than twenty years ago, when I was backpacking through Europe as an eighteen-year-old high school graduate. I had traveled south from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara desert, to a place where nomadic tribes came in from the desert to barter and trade, a place that when I look on a map I can no longer find. One night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution—heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me—the sense of being lit by starlight—and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions—the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call “structure,” that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to the other, stars stranger in their numbers than the wooden cart full of severed goat heads I had seen that morning, or the poverty of the rag-clad children that afternoon, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.

So much was right about that night. It was a time of my life when I was every day experiencing something new (food, people, places). I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting upon me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality). Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.

When I tell Berman about Morocco he says, “A sad corollary to that story is when my wife’s mom visited us once. And she had spent her life living in either Long Island or Florida, light-polluted places. We heard the car drive up, heard the trunk close, heard her wheel her luggage to the house, and when she came in she said to Marcy, ‘What are all those white dots in the sky?’ And of course Marcy said, ‘Those are called stars, Mom.’”

“I’ve heard people say such things,” I laugh, “but I can’t believe they’re true.”

Berman leans back and calls, “Marcy, do you remember when your mom said what are those white dots in the sky?”

“Yep.”

“Do you think she was kidding?”

“Nope.”

Seeing stars is something Bob Berman has done all his life. And here in upstate New York, the sky still offers a wonderful view.

“We get down to about magnitude five point eight, five point nine, where you see a good twenty-five hundred stars,” he says, referring to the scale astronomers use to describe the brightness of individual stars. “Theoretically, three thousand stars are visible to the naked eye at one time, but, in truth, since the overwhelming bulk of stars are fifth and sixth magnitude—the fainter you go, by far the more stars there are—and because extinction near the horizon is so great, the truth is faint stars stop at about ten degrees from the horizon and you lose a swath.”

We adopted the idea of magnitude from the ancient Greeks, who called the brightest stars “first magnitude” and the dimmest “sixth magnitude.” When modern astronomy put precise measurement to the Greek magnitude idea, a few of the brightest stars actually turned out to have minus numbers, such as Sirius (-1.5). But these values are all relative, reflecting only how we see these stars from Earth. The brightest star in the history of the universe could be fainter than faint if it’s far enough from our view.

It’s commonly accepted that the naked-eye limit is magnitude 6.5, though some observers report magnitude 7.0 or better. As Berman writes,

There are few brilliant stars, many more medium ones, and a flood of faint stars. This hierarchy continues with a vengeance below the threshold of human vision. Recent advances have allowed telescopes to detect stars of magnitude 29—more than a billion times fainter than anything the unaided eye can perceive! This is very faint indeed: The light from such a star equals the glow of a single cigarette seen from 125,000 miles away.

But a light-polluted sky renders all this meaningless, of course, as the greatest wealth of stars lie in the larger values of magnitude, exactly the magnitudes erased by artificial light.

“My feeling,” says Berman, “is that an observer needs to see four hundred fifty stars at a time to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away, and go, ‘Oh, isn’t that beautiful.’ And I didn’t make that number up arbitrarily—that’s the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it’s attractive to no one. In the city you say, ‘Oh, there’s Vega, who cares?’ And if there’s a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn’t do it. There’s a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you’re touching that ancient core, whether it’s collective memories or genetic memories or something else from way back before we were even human. So you gotta get that, and anything short of that doesn’t do it.”

Humans have long found in stars like these the familiar shapes that reflect our lives. For modern viewers these shapes sometimes make absolute sense, as with the scorpion of Scorpius, or the hunter Orion. The same is true of an asterism like the Summer Triangle, a shape made of bright stars from separate constellations: Vega from Lyra, the Lyre; Deneb from Cygnus, the Swan; and Altair from Aquila, the Eagle. But then there are the many constellations that puzzle us with their amorphous shapes and illogical identities, as though they are the eternal result of some ancient Greek joke. A good example is Auriga, with its bright star Capella, which lies just above Orion, readily apparent to any stargazer. How many of us would identify this shape as a charioteer? And Auriga is one of the easy constellations; try identifying Monoceros, the Unicorn, or Cetus, the Sea Monster, which both lie near Orion as well. With an image in mind (a good astronomy book or smartphone app helps), some of the ancient figures like Cassiopeia and Perseus may appear, but others (Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder—which is hard to say, let alone see) are almost surely never to register.

Still, things could be worse, or at least more complicated. In 1627, the German astronomer Julius Schiller attempted to Christianize the sky by replacing the names of the constellations with the names of characters from the Bible. Thus the twelve constellations of the zodiac became the twelve disciples, and the constellations from the Northern Hemisphere were replaced by characters from the New Testament and those in the Southern Hemisphere with characters from the Old Testament. For better or worse, his idea never caught on. Not so lucky were the southern skies, where many of the constellations reflect the fascination of European explorers from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century for the practical new inventions of their time. Such inspirational constellations as the Air Pump, the Draftsman’s Compass, and the Chemical Furnace live on today, as do the creatively named Telescopium and Microscopium. But not all is lost in the Southern Hemisphere, at least for children and those childlike at heart, all of whom can forever delight in pointing to the nautically inspired Puppis, the Poop Deck.

In order for us to see the stars in anything close to their possibilities—whether the awe-inspiring numbers Berman talks about, or in constellations both familiar and ridiculous—we need darkness. But how dark is dark? My hunch is that for most of us there are basically three levels. First, there is dark as in, “It’s night, so it’s dark.” This is the standard notion of night’s darkness, and it corresponds to around Bortle 8 down through Bortle 5. Next, at least for anyone lucky enough to find him-or herself in an area that would correspond to Bortle 4 or 3 or 2 (or, certainly 1), there is really dark, as in, “It’s really dark out here.” And finally, there is for some people a level of “darkness” that equates to “Vegas, baby!”

The reality, though, is far more complex. This is the message from Bortle’s scale and the World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness—we don’t know what real darkness looks like, because we seldom ever see it.

One place to see real darkness in Manhattan is at the Museum of Modern Art, in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Unless Van Gogh’s oil on canvas from 1889 is traveling as part of an exhibition, it hangs at home on its MoMA wall as fifty million people pass by every year. On a Saturday morning I stand near Van Gogh’s scene of stars and moon and sleeping town, talking with its guardian for the day, Joseph, as he repeats, “No flash, no flash,” “Two feet away,” and “Too close, too close” again and again as people from around the world crowd near. “What’s the appeal of this painting?” I ask. “It’s beautiful,” he says. “What more can you say than that?”

You could rightly leave it at that. But I love the story this painting tells, of a small dark town, a few yellow-orange gaslights in house windows, under a giant swirling and waving blue-green sky. This is a painting of our world from before night had been pushed back to the forest and the seas, from back when sleepy towns slept without streetlights. People are too quick, I think, to imagine the story of this painting—and especially this sky—is simply that of a crazy man, “a werewolf of energy,” as Joachim Pissarro, curator at the MoMA exhibition Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, would tell me. While Van Gogh certainly had his troubles, this painting looks as it does in part because it’s of a time that no longer exists, a time when the night sky would have looked a lot more like this. Does Van Gogh use his imagination? Of course—he’s said to have painted the scene in his asylum cell at St. Remy from studies he’d done outside and from memory—but this is an imagined sky inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen. It’s an imagined sky inspired by the real sky over a town much darker than the towns we live in today. So a painting of a night imagined? Sure. But unreal?

In our age, yes. But Van Gogh lived in a time before electric light. In a letter from the summer of 1888, he described what he’d seen while walking a southern French beach:

The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than at home—even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.

It’s remarkable to modern eyes, first of all, that Van Gogh would reference the stars over Paris—no one has seen a sky remotely close to this over Paris for at least fifty years. But stars of different colors? It’s true. Even on a clear dark night the human eye struggles to notice these different colors because it works with two kinds of light receptors: rods and cones. The cones are the color sensors, but they don’t respond to faint illumination. The rods are more finely attuned to dim light, but they don’t discriminate colors. When we look at a starry sky, the sensitive but color-blind rods do most of the work, and so the stars appear mostly white. Add to this that we seldom stay outside long enough for our eyes to adapt to the dark, and then the fact that most of us live with a sky deafened by light pollution, and the idea that stars come in different colors seems wildly impossible, like something from Willy Wonka or Lewis Carroll (or Vincent van Gogh). But gaze long enough, in a place dark enough that stars stand in clear three-dimensional beauty, and you will spot flashes of red, green, yellow, orange, and blue.

You may even feel as the Dutch painter did, that “looking at the stars always makes me dream.”

But this morning at MoMA I am here to see two paintings, the second so little known that the museum doesn’t even have it on display. It’s through the kindness of Jennifer Schauer, who oversees the paintings in storage, that I get to see it. She marches me past The Starry Night to a room in which many paintings that the museum has no room to display are kept; 75 percent of the collection is here. Schauer looks at a label or two and then pulls out a fencelike wall on which the painting I’ve come to see hangs. And here it is, blazing away: Giacomo Balla’s Street Light from 1909. For me, the fact MoMA has its view of a starry night on display every hour of every day, while this brilliantly colorful painting of an electric streetlight is hidden in backroom shadows, is deliciously ironic. This may be the only place in the city where the streetlight has been put away while the starry night continues to shine.

Here is a painting of the very thing that makes Van Gogh’s vision of a starry night such an unrealistic one for most of us. In both paintings, the moon lives in the upper right corner, and for Van Gogh, the moon is a throbbing yellow presence pulsing with natural light. But for Balla, the moon has become a little biscuit wafer hanging on for dear life, overwhelmed by the electric streetlight. And that, in fact, was Balla’s purpose. “Let’s kill the Moonlight!” was the rallying cry from Balla’s fellow Italian futurist, Filippo Marinetti. These futurists believed in noise and speed and light—human light, modern light, electric light. What use could we now have of something so yesterday as the moon?

“It’s lighting itself up,” Schauer says. On a canvas three times the size of The Starry Night, with a background of darkness painted sea blue-green and brown, the electric lamp radiates rose-mauve-green-yellow in upside-down Vs. The lamppost is a candy cane of those same colors, while concentric circles of the colorful Vs reverberate with resonant light. Here is an optimistic vision of what electricity would mean, not only a night brighter than what we’d known but one more beautiful as well. Indeed, were this what electric lighting had eventually come to be, Balla’s reverence would be absolutely understandable even in our day. But of course, as my host says, “New York is never dark enough to see this.”

And so here, fifty meters apart, hang two paintings that span a bridge of time when night began to change from something few of us have ever known into the night we know so well we don’t even notice it anymore. Done in the southern French countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Gogh’s is a painting of old night. Done in the city at the start of the twentieth century, Balla’s is a painting of night from now on. With time, electric lights like the one Balla portrayed would spread across western Europe and North America, perhaps inspiring the popularity of Van Gogh’s painting as they did: As we lost our view of our own starry night, our view of his became more and more fantastic—this old night he had known and loved and experienced by gaslight.

8

Tales from Two Cities

The secrets are very simple. Blend light with the surroundings. Don’t annoy the birds, the insects, the neighbors or the astronomers. If City Hall gave me money to do whatever I want, I’d teach people about the beauty of light.

—FRANçOIS JOUSSE (2010)

Gas street lighting first took flame on Pall Mall in London in 1807, with the light hailed as “beautifully white and brilliant.” Within a decade more than forty thousand gas lamps lit over two hundred miles of London streets, a scene described by a visitor as “thousands of lamps, in long chains of fire.” When, by 1825, the British capital was the most populous city in the world, no other place on earth was as extensively lit, or as bright.

Though “bright” depends on whom you ask. To the nineteenth-century eye—which until that time had never seen streets lit by more than candle lanterns or oil lamps—gaslight would have been unquestionably bright. But to our modern eye, gas lamps can seem questionably dim—you might wonder if they’re even working. This isn’t only perception—modern Londoners (as well as city dwellers all over the world, including 40 percent of Americans) live amid such a wash of electric light that their eyes never transition to scotopic, or night, vision—never move from relying on cone cells to rod. With gaslight, they did—the nineteenth-century eye saw gaslit nights with scotopic vision, and so what would seem to us incredibly dim seemed to a Londoner at the time the perfect artificial light, with “a brightness clear as summer’s noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight,” one that created “a city of softness and mystery, with sudden pools of light fringed by blackness and silence.” London ranks now as one of the brightest cities in the world—a white-hot splat on the World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness. Nonetheless, I have come to the city to see if, even so, amid all that light, that “city of softness and mystery” remains.

I have a hunch it might, as London is still home to more than sixteen hundred gas lamps, most in the famous parts of town north of the Thames such as Westminster, the Temple, and St. James’s Park. British Gas, which has direct responsibility for twelve hundred, employs a six-man gas lamp team made up of two gas engineers and four lamplighters, each of whom tends to four hundred lamps. Though they no longer need light each individual lamp, a task Robert Louis Stevenson described in 1881 as “speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk,” the lamplighters make a circuit from lamp to lamp that usually runs about two weeks, cleaning the lamps, relighting pilot lights, winding the timers. Stevenson mourned the lamplighter’s impending fate from the imminent arrival of electric light, writing, “The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such a one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it.” Greek myth or no, the modern lamplighter’s job is a popular one, with positions seldom changing hands.

On a crisp December evening, I join two members of the British Gas team, Gary and Iain, at St. Stephen’s Tavern near Westminster Bridge, meeting amid the locals packed wall to wall, ties loosened and coats on their arms, before going out to see some of the best of the lights. About their affection for the lamps, both men are unabashed. “Once you get involved you fall in love with it,” Gary says. And Iain, who moved to London from Glasgow, Scotland, tells me, “When I came down here I’d never seen a gas lamp before. I was totally taken by the history, and I found myself walking along the streets looking at electric lights thinking, Bastards, why is that not gas?”