An incident that emphasizes just how far some city dwellers are removed from real stars occurred in the hours following a major Los Angeles-area earthquake in 1994. The 4 a.m. quake, centered in North-ridge, California, had prompted almost everybody who felt it to rush outdoors for safety and to inspect the damage. But the trembling landscape had also knocked out power over a wide area.
Standing outside in total darkness for the first time in memory, hundreds of thousands of people saw a sky untarnished by city lights. That night and over the next few weeks, emergency organization 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” had caused the quake. Such a reaction can only come from people who have never seen the night sky away from city lights.
According to Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, many of the anxious callers were reluctant to believe that what they had seen while the power was off was the normal appearance of the real night sky. Krupp, an expert in sky mythology and constellation lore, say that a new mythology was appeared over the past 30 years, a period which coincides with massive increase in the quantity and brightness of outdoor lighting fixtures.
“Since so many of us never see a non-light-polluted night sky from one year to the next,” he explains, “ a mythology about what people think a true star-filled sky looks like has emerged.”
This has spawned what I call urban star myths--generally accepted “facts” about the appearance of the night sky--that can be proved false by just looking at a starry night sky. But, of course, that’s the problem.
An example of an urban star myth?
How about this: “The North Star is the brightest star in the night sky.” Although this is a commonly accepted “fact,” the reality is that Polaris, the North Star, is always outshone by 15 to 25 brighter stars, depending on the time of year.
-Terence Dickinson
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