Two Photographers Set Out To Capture the Lost Night
Have you ever seen the Milky Way with your own eyes? You really should. It’s an experience both awesome and marvelous in the truest sense of those words. Sadly, thanks to light pollution, most people can’t just step outside at night, look up, and gaze through the streaking arm of our galaxy.
Filmmakers and astrophotographers Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic (featured here before) have launched a Kickstarter project called SKYGLOW that sets out to educate people on the ill effects of light pollution to our species and others, while inspiring us to reconnect with the same stars that have inspired our species for eons.
In the video above, a beautiful composite of stellar and urban time lapses, the pair imagine what the skies over Los Angeles would look like if we could see more than the glow of sodium vapor and aircraft strobes. That’s fantasy, sadly, but so is the idea of truly dark skies in most parts of the world:
“For a lot of people, the idea of an incredible night sky is becoming more science fiction than ever before.”According to Heffernan and Mehmedinovic, half of the light that we humans produce is pointed up at the night sky. This wastes energy. It wastes resources. It wastes the very splendor of the night sky. It’s as if we’ve taken an eraser made of photons and rubbed out each jewel in Earth’s starry canopy one by one.
Most of us today live beneath skies that are only half night, and as Earth’s population grows in number and consumption there are fewer and fewer dark sky sanctuaries left. Let’s save them, so people like you and me and Heffernan and Mehmedinovic have something to look up to.
To learn more about the dark sky movement and the effects of light pollution, check out the International Dark-Sky Association. And to find out how you can support the SKYGLOW Kickstarter, check out the video below:
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