'Noctalgia' is a feature of the modern age.

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.

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    Or the big advertisement screens. I get the need for street lights but they also don’t have to be the most brightest super white LEDs that exist either. Nowadays I literally can’t even tell whether it is cloudy or not, because the sky is just this mushy grey noise. And the sad thing is that I still remember the night sky from a couple decades ago when cities weren’t quite as bright. Now you can be lucky to see the little dim flickering of the brightest odd stars every now and then.

    • Gerbler@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      the sky is just this mushy grey noise

      You might even say it’s the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel