Every civilisation we know of has devised a system – scientific, religious, what have you – to make sense of the night sky. The mystery of what’s up there, where it came from, and what it means has been inherited and puzzled over for generations. Those questions may be the most human ones we have.

Due to pervasive light pollution – glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting – 80% of Europe and North America no longer experiences real darkness. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way seems abstract: we understand it to be a document of something true, but our understanding is purely theoretical. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky”. What those callers were seeing were stars.

I grew up in a small town in the Hudson River valley, about an hour north of New York City. Like most children, I regarded the night sky (or what I could see of it) with wonder. I understood that nobody could say for sure what was out there. Little kids are often frustrated by the smallness of their lives – as a child, you can conjure complex worlds, but in your own life, you are largely powerless to make moves. Looking up, the tininess I felt was confirmed, but it no longer felt like a liability. If the night sky offers us one thing, it is a liberating sense of ourselves in perspective, and of the many things we can neither comprehend nor control.

“I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1856. He understood those worlds as separate, but in some essential conversation with each other – to receive one without the other was to misunderstand both. But what happens when mankind divorces itself from a true experience of the cosmos, separating from the vastness above, taming it by erasing it? How can we ever come to know a heaven we can barely see?

Darkness is a complicated thing to quantify, defined, as it is, by deficiency. In 2001, the amateur astronomer John Bortle devised a scale to help. His classifications range from “inner-city sky” (class 9), in which the only “pleasing telescopic views are the moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters”, to a sky so dark “the Milky Way casts obvious diffuse shadows on the ground” (class 1). Most North Americans and Europeans live under class 6 or 7 skies, in which the Milky Way is undetectable and the sky has been smudged by “a vague, greyish-white hue”. In that kind of night, a person can wander outside, unfold a garden chair, open a newspaper, and read the headlines, if not the stories.

Under class 6 or 7 night skies, a person can wander outside, open a newspaper, and read the headlines

In addition to the Bortle scale, scientists often use photodiode light sensors to measure and compare base levels of darkness by calculating the illuminance of the night sky as perceived by the human eye. Unihedron’s Sky Quality Meter is the most popular instrument for this kind of work, in part because it is small enough to fit into your pocket and also because it connects to an online global database of user-submitted data. According to that database, Cherry Springs State Park – an 82-acre park in a remote swath of rural Pennsylvania – presently has the second darkest score listed. On the Bortle scale, Cherry Springs usually registers between 1 and 2. In 2008, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), a nonprofit organisation that establishes and supports dark-sky preserves around the world, designated it a gold-tier international dark sky park.

Earlier this year, I drove the six hours to Cherry Springs from New York to meet Chip Harrison, the park’s manager, his wife, Maxine, and a park volunteer named Pam for a 4.30pm dinner of baked fish. Afterwards, Chip had promised, we’d go and see stars.

“Most children, right now, growing up in the US, will never see the Milky Way,” Chip said while we waited for our main courses.

“Their parents never saw it either,” Maxine added.

“You come to a place like Cherry Springs, you’re gonna see four or five thousand stars, maybe more,” he continued. “I’ve seen people who are fairly serious amateur astronomers, and they can’t find their way around this night sky – there are too many stars.”

After supper, we drove to the park, arriving around sunset and unloading several bags of equipment from the trunk before setting out, together, into the blackness. White light isn’t permitted on the astronomy grounds, but red-filtered light, which won’t cause the rods of the eye to become overexposed and less efficient, is allowed, if not quite encouraged.

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“If you hear crunching, you’re on the right path,” Maxine announced over her shoulder. I only presumed she said it over her shoulder. The dark around us was compact, bottomless, sonorous and I was echo-locating poorly. I blinked city eyes. We crunched along a gravel path towards the astronomy field, where Chip was assembling an Orion SkyQuest telescope. The SkyQuest is stout but sizable, about eight inches in diameter, and ideal for locating deep-sky objects such as dim star clusters, nebulae and galaxies.

At the edge of the field, a former airstrip, killdeer birds cheeped eagerly, constantly; a woodcock sounded a burp-like call. It was four days after the new moon, and the sky was so black that even the tiny slice of visible moon felt like a bare bulb screwed into the ceiling of an interrogation chamber.

On a clear night, from the proper vantage, watching constellations emerge over Cherry Springs is like watching a freshly exposed photograph sink into a bath of developer, slowly becoming known to the eye. Pam pointed the telescope towards Jupiter, which had risen over the east end of the field. The four largest moons of Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were clearly visible through the lens. Galileo discovered these moons in 1610, in the skies above Padua. They were the first celestial bodies proven to be orbiting something other than Earth. With my face still pressed into the telescope, I gasped.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The US at night, 2012. Photograph: Planet Observer/Getty Images/Universal Images Group

Pam laughed. “Usually when people look through the telescope, I point out the big ‘wow’ items, like the planets, Saturn and Jupiter, some of the clusters,” she said. “Everybody looks at them and goes, ‘Oh, my God.’ They go, ‘Is that real?’”

Cherry Springs is located less than 300 miles inland from the US eastern seaboard, in a region – the East Coast – that contains 36% of the total US population and is lit up every night like a backstage makeup mirror. When pinpointed on a satellite image, Cherry Springs is in the middle of an uncharacteristically dark patch – insulated, on all sides, by hundreds of thousands of acres of protected forest and perched atop the Allegheny Plateau, 700 metres (2,300 feet) above sea level. Most of the small towns surrounding the park are situated in valleys where outdoor light is already sparse. This unusual combination of factors explains, to a certain degree, how Cherry Springs became one of the darkest places in America.

Which isn’t to say the sanctity of the sky here is not being encroached upon. In the last decade, a handful of energy companies have begun extracting natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica Shales underneath Pennsylvania via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a much-reviled practice that involves the release of gas or petroleum via a high-pressure injection of fluid through a narrow shaft bored into the ground. In Potter County, where Cherry Springs is located, there are 40 active fracking sites. The work cycle in a gas field is nonstop: energy companies not only rig up colossal, stadium-style spotlights, they also burn off excess gas in open pits or through steel pipes, in a process known as flaring. From afar, a flare resembles a giant blowtorch; clusters of flares are visible on satellite images from space.

Chip – who is exceedingly kind and mild-mannered, possessing the sort of preternatural calm seemingly required of park rangers – has worked out an informal agreement with representatives from nearby wells, in which workers abstain from flaring at night during star parties, when amateur astronomers gather in Cherry Springs to observe and record astral phenomena, or when the park is hosting astronomy-related public programmes. But it’s chiefly a gentleman’s agreement, reliant on neighbourly goodwill. At present, there are no light-pollution restrictions placed on energy companies by the state of Pennsylvania.

Gary Honis, an electrical engineer and astrophotographer based in Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania, has been visiting Cherry Springs for 25 years, since long before it was recognised internationally for its stargazing potential. Feeling disheartened by the bright skies in their area, his local astronomy group had “pulled out an old air force map, a satellite map, that showed a dark area in Potter County. We compared that to a Pennsylvania road map, and it was Cherry Springs State Park. That’s how we found it, by looking at light-pollution maps. My first view was through a friend’s six-inch Dobsonian telescope, and it was of M51, the twin galaxies in Ursa Major,” Honis said when we spoke on the telephone. “It looked photographic. We never saw that back home.”

Chip eventually came upon Honis, tented by foil, peering up at the heavens. The park had been closed for hours, but Honis convinced Chip to let him stick around and take some pictures. Their meeting was serendipitous. With Chip’s advocacy, the park’s hours eventually changed to allow for visiting stargazers, who, with the proper permit, can now camp overnight on the astronomy field.

Since then, Honis has been outspoken about the effect fracking is having on the skies above Cherry Springs. He’s posted videos to YouTube – often accompanied by ominous music he performs himself on his Moog Theremini – linking fracking to declining sky-quality readings. The videos are convincing, showing, via time-lapse photography, how gas flares and unshielded drill-site lights are compromising the park for astronomers. “We started doing sky quality meter readings of the night sky brightness in 2006, and since then, the skies over Cherry Springs have been getting much brighter,” Honis said. “When the fracking started, sky quality readings went very bad.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The gas flares of a fracking site illuminates a country road in California. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

The nocturnal world, of course, also generates its own light, and those deviations can affect dark-sky conditions. The National Park Service lists numerous natural sources: moonlight, starlight from individual stars and planets, the Milky Way (also called galactic light, or integrated starlight), zodiacal light (sunlight reflected off dust particles in the solar system), airglow (a faint aurora caused by radiation striking air molecules in the upper atmosphere), wildfire, lightning strikes and meteors. Atmospheric moisture or dust particles can refract or reflect that light, amplifying glow (deserts, for example, are low in moisture but high in dust; forests are the inverse). Air pollution makes it all worse.

On the night we ventured out in Cherry Springs, Maxine – a former game warden, one of just a few women to hold that position in Pennsylvania – had fixed her gaze towards the sky. We were quiet. Maxine was wearing a pair of dangly moon-and-stars earrings, which glinted in the starlight. “This is where the word awesome comes from,” she whispered.

In the 17th century, under the reign of the self-described Sun King, Louis XIV, tallow candles fashioned from rendered beef or mutton fat were placed in iron-framed glass boxes and strung above the streets of Paris. Lamplighters wandered the districts of the city at dusk, unlocking the boxes and igniting the wicks. Other places followed Paris’s model, and candles eventually gave way to oil and then gas lamps.

By 1890, more than 175,000 electric streetlights had been installed in the US; there are now somewhere around 26m

By 1890, more than 175,000 electric streetlights had been installed in the US; there are now somewhere around 26m, which collectively cost American taxpayers about $6bn in annual energy costs. The idea at its inception was that street lighting would help officials of the state more effectively survey and control city streets after dark. Whether streetlights actually make anyone safer remains a contentious topic among scholars and city planners. Most studies fail to demonstrate an inarguable correlation between street lighting and decreases in traffic accidents or crime, although it feels wilfully obtuse to suggest that taking the dark way home is always just as safe.

Street lighting is undeniably pervasive, but it isn’t the only culprit of our perpetually bright skies. Light pollution is aggravated by any kind of irresponsibly aimed outdoor lighting: stadium floodlights, illuminated billboards, futuristic Exxon stations beckoning tired drivers towards off-ramps with their neat rows of glowing pumps. Proper shielding and direction can mitigate the glare of these emanations – which can be blinding – and the International Dark-Sky Association publishes guidelines for easily modifying outdoor lighting to be more dark-sky friendly. But in most places, following the association’s suggestions is optional. The right to light isn’t easily denied, nor circumvented.

In recent years, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Los Angeles have been swapping the high-pressure sodium bulbs in their streetlights – which produced puddles of gassy, orange-hued light, a grittily romantic flicker – for comparably cost-effective LED bulbs. The temperature of sodium bulbs is usually around 2,200 Kelvin, which registers to the eye as warm. LED bulbs burn closer to 4,000 Kelvin and emit an intrusive, bluish glare. If you live in a major American city, it is now virtually impossible to spend any time at all outside and in the dark.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chicago Photograph: Jim Richardson/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative

The new LED streetlights are almost universally described as unpleasant. New York is presently in the midst of its own retrofit, a colossal overhaul scheduled to be completed by the end of 2017. The bulbs last longer and will ultimately reduce energy use by up to 75%, according to the US Department of Energy. But after the new bulbs were installed in Windsor Terrace, a residential neighbourhood in Brooklyn, citizens reacted with disbelief. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, the novelist and Windsor Terrace local Lionel Shriver wrote: “Although going half-blind at 58, I can read by the beam that the new lamp blasts into our front room without tapping our own Con Ed service… These lights are ugly. They’re invasive. They’re depressing. New York deserves better.”

Susan Harder, the New York State representative of the International Dark-Sky Association and a board member of the Montauk Observatory in East Hampton, has been campaigning aggressively against the installation of LED streetlights in New York. “We still think that God lives in the heavens, in part because the sky was so dynamic to ancient cultures,” she explained when I asked her to explain how the problem goes beyond the bulbs themselves. “How could you ignore a changing, moving night sky? It struck them with awe. They attributed all sorts of things to the night sky. We’re going to lose that if towns and cities keep installing these LED streetlights.”

Harder previously had a career as an art dealer but now works full time as a dark-sky activist. She has the kind of fast-talking, no-nonsense comportment that recalls Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and is, by all accounts, a formidable opponent. In 2006, a New York Times reporter described her as “a virtual one-woman dark-sky mover and shaker”, and characterised her particular approach to advocacy as a “combination of sweet talk, cajoling and bullying.”

The single biggest challenge facing dark-sky advocates such as Harder is working out a way to change our understanding of darkness as a nefarious force, a thing that needs to be avoided or controlled, if not vanquished entirely. What may seem like a logical and instinctive aversion – our vision is impaired at night and we are therefore more vulnerable – has been socially reinforced via so many avenues that it’s exhausting to even try to tally them up. From a very young age, we are taught that nighttime is when dubious things transpire. At best, night is considered a middling expanse (“No occupation but sleepe, feed, and fart,” as the Jacobean playwright and poet Thomas Middleton put it). At worst, it is terrifying.

In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian A Roger Ekirch details the ways in which nearly every known civilisation figured darkness as a source of evil: “Everywhere one looks in the ancient world, demons filled the night air,” he writes. Even in our earliest folklore, night is a proxy for wickedness, worthy of trepidation. Christianity positioned God as a source of eternal and unblinking light, a corrective to spiritual darkness and chaos. Torches, candles, oil lamps, gas lamps, lightbulbs – these were not only facilitators of productivity and examples of the extraordinary ingenuity of man, but also sacred talismans to ward off ever-encroaching night and the malevolence it supposedly enables.

It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe

Most historical reasons to fear darkness are now moot; our unease at night is more transcendental than pragmatic. In the US, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.5% of violent crimes actually occur during the daytime, between 6am and 6pm. Still, a kind of basic discomfort with darkness persists. Changing deeply ingrained cultural ideas about darkness is a complicated task. It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe, spreading out from here to God-knows-where.

I wrote to Ekirch to see how he understood the stakes of the battle to preserve the dark. “At the least, we stand to forfeit age-old opportunities for human intimacy of the sort that darkness alone enhances – not just by affording privacy but by drawing couples closer together physically and emotionally,” he replied in an email. Then he quoted an anonymous early Italian essayist, who described darkness as its own lubricant for human communion: “Darkness made it easy to tell all.”

Ekirch also evoked the idea that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the night sky itself was “a source of inspiration [that] knew no bounds, all the more as vestiges of church and state, to name but two powerful institutions, receded in the darkness,” he wrote. “On a moonlit evening in Naples, Goethe felt ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘a feeling of infinite space.’ Exclaimed an English laborer in the 18th century as he treaded home from an alehouse: ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars.’ To which, replied his companion, ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’ Today, few modern critics of light pollution, I suspect, could put the case more passionately.”

A few weeks before I visited Cherry Springs, I went with a couple of friends to a sensory deprivation chamber in Brooklyn. Formerly a component of psychological experiments – and, on occasion, deployed as an interrogation technique – sensory deprivation is now being reconfigured as a kind of bourgeois meditation aid: For $99 (£75), you can float for an hour in 30cm or so of heavily salted mineral water (roughly 450kg of Epsom salts per tub), calibrated precisely to your body temperature, inside a sealed, soundproof, lightproof, womb-like chamber. The idea is to disappear a little. The stresses and expectations of a modern life seem to demand an antidote of, well, nothingness.

I was not a natural inhabitant of the tank. I spent the first 15 minutes karate-kicking the door open and then pulling it closed again – mostly to make sure it would, in fact, still open and close. I pressed the button that turns the lights on and off approximately 50 times. I decided to stretch one hand out – ostensibly to see if I could still see it in the dark; I could not – and accidentally dribbled warm, salty water into my open eyes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Milky Way seen from Cherry Springs National Park, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Serge Pikhotskiy/Getty Images

Eventually, once I had tired myself out, I was able to consider the experience of pure darkness, unbroken even by starlight. I understood how people found it curative: there’s a disassembling that occurs, a loosening of certain grips. But darkness, without the galactic punctuations of the night sky – without stars and planets and moons – feels more finite than infinite. It feels claustrophobic.

On my third night in Pennsylvania, I went back to the park by myself, after midnight. I stumbled on to the astronomy field, wearing a pair of pyjamas underneath my coat. My rental was the only car in the lot. It had been raining earlier that afternoon, and thick, heavy clouds now hung low in the atmosphere, obscuring the moon and almost all of the stars. It was as dark a place as I’d ever been. There, shivering, I again felt something akin to genuine panic. When the brain is deprived of visual information – when all external stimuli are washed out – we are alone in new ways. I wondered, then, if the dark acted as a kind of Rorschach test: if our perception of it wasn’t also a manifestation of our most profound fears. Whatever you conjure there, in the blackness, speaks to your innermost terrors.

Astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know

When I got back to New York, I spoke to Matt Stanley, a colleague at the university where I teach. Stanley holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics and the history of science. He leads a seminar called Achilles’ Shield: Mapping the Ancient Cosmos, and another called Understanding the Universe.

“I’ve found that probably 95% of my students come from either an urban or suburban environment, which means they can only see a dozen stars at night, and no planets,” Stanley said. “When you say the Milky Way to them, they imagine a spiral galaxy, which is fine, but that’s not what the Milky Way looks like – it’s a big, whitish smear across the sky. I have to do a lot of work to orient them to what human beings actually saw when they looked at the sky. They don’t know that stars rise and set. Their minds explode.”

An alarmist may wonder if light pollution is threatening the future of astronomy – if the skies will eventually become so illuminated that we’ll no longer be able to identify new celestial objects, given that we can barely see the ones we already know are there. Stanley said: “The best astronomy nowadays is being done from space. When I did my astronomy degree, I never looked through a telescope. Now, you can imagine a world – almost a dystopia – where no human being has ever seen a celestial body with the naked eye, but we have fantastically sophisticated astronomy, because we do it all above the atmosphere. It’s efficient, but it breaks with those initial questions: why does the sky behave like that?”

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That curiosity was the catalyst for centuries of intellectual and spiritual growth. “Science, as we understand it, comes from this very old tradition of trying to understand what we saw in the night sky,” Stanley said. Babylonian astronomy gave us time, later mathematics; astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know. Our instinctive preoccupation with the content of the sky seems tangled up, somehow, with all those other inborn human desires: to know and be known. To feel cowed, sublimated. To wonder and to worship.

“The experience of looking up at the sky – that’s what Kant uses to explain the sublime,” Stanley said. “In 1788, he said, ‘There are two things that fill my heart with wonder. One is the moral sense within me, and the other is the order in the heavens above me.’ That’s an extraordinary feeling, and ineffable. You can’t describe it, but once you’ve experienced it, you never forget it.”

This is a version of an essay published in the Summer 2016 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review

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