'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.

  • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    In the summer, at night, we’re facing the galactic center. You can see the cloud of uncountable stars held close to the supermassive black hole at the center, and you can see the band of light spanning the sky that it the rest of the disk and arms.

    It’s the reason the galaxy is called the Milky Way, because those billions of stars looks kinds like somebody spilled milk all across the night sky.

    If you are in the darkest parts of the world I think you can still see it a bit in winter but you’re looking outward into intergalactic space, so it’s much fainter, only showing the stars in our arm that are even further out.