When I was a kid, my family lived in suburban Washington, D.C. This made being a budding amateur astronomer tough; most stars were invisible against the overhead glare from city lights. At best, there was only a hint of the diffuse Milky Way to see: the combined radiance of a hundred billion stars dimmed to near-nothingness by bright streetlamps and storefronts.
This is light pollution—human-generated illumination cast up into the heavens —causing the sky itself to glow and washing out the stars. Astronomers have known for years the situation is bad for stargazing, but it also has real and negative effects on the well-being of many living things—plants, animals and even human beings. More than 80 percent of humanity is affected by light pollution, their view of the skies being stolen away.
For most of us, the stars are, in essence, going out.
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