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By Root 1005 0

the cobbled street and the stars. The glow of gaslight washes the walls of the café and its canopy roof; here and there a private, ruddy luminescence shines from second- and third-floor windows, and a few shop windows glow. But beyond the terrace, the dark increases quickly, and stars glitter in the gaps between buildings. Present-day astrophysicist Charles Whitney suggests that van Gogh "has overpopulated the small patch of sky in view of the interference that might be expected from the café lights." And van Gogh himself once insisted, "I should be desperate if my figures were correct. ...I do not want them to be academically correct.... My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodelings, changes in reality, so that they may become yes, lies if you like—but truer than the literal truth." You can imagine, in the truth of his time, that even in the midst of nightlife, contemplation of the stars was part of being at home in the world, a counterpart to earthly life.

For many people, light pollution is now so pervasive that it obliterates any chance they may have to observe the night sky. In particular, sky glow—the orangey brightness in the air around cities, towns, and industrial sites that fades to purple in the upper night sky—hinders our seeing. Although sunlight reflecting off the moon, earth, and cosmic dust, and starlight scattering through the atmosphere, make for some natural sky glow, the ubiquitous light shed from homes, businesses, and streetlamps causes most of it. In the twenty-first century, even many wide suburban backyard views of the heavens have shrunk to a sprinkling of dim stars, and most people in the developed world see the night sky as if it is always washed in moonlight, at least as bright as a first-quarter moon. To people in large modern cities, the night sky always appears brighter than on nights near the full moon in the countryside, and the Milky Way—that bridge across the sky of dust and stars and gas, "brilliant with its own brightness," Ovid once wrote—can't be seen with the naked eye by two-thirds of Americans and half of all Europeans.

The Milky Way had always been the stuff of legend, variously called the Deer Jump, the Silver River, the Straw Thief's Way, the Way of the Birds, the Way of the White Elephant, the Winter Way, and the Heavenly Nile. It guided pilgrims at night and so was known also as the River of Heaven, the Road to Santiago, and the Roman Road. Now its appearance has become so unfamiliar that when the lights went out in Los Angeles during a 1994 earthquake, "emergency organizations as well as observatories and radio stations in the L.A. area received hundreds of calls from people wondering whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of a 'silver cloud' (the Milky Way) had caused the quake."

If you can't see the Milky Way anymore, you can't see a fourth-magnitude star, magnitude being the measure of how bright a star appears from earth. The brightest objects have negative magnitudes: the magnitude of Sirius is –1.4 and that of Venus is –4.5. In moderately light-polluted skies—where the Milky Way no longer appears—about three hundred second- and third-magnitude stars are still visible, but all the lesser ones—almost seven thousand fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-magnitude stars—are lost. Also, all the stars in light-polluted skies are less apparent than they were to our ancestors because the lights we live by are often so bright they suppress the rod system of the human eye: "About one-tenth of the World population, more than 40 percent of the United States population and one sixth of the European Union population no longer view the heavens with the eye adapted to night vision, because of the sky brightness."

The disappearance of stars is most keenly felt by astronomers, the true descendants of Galileo, who turned the first telescope toward the night sky. "Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision," wrote Galileo in 1610, "adding countless