Lights in the Sky

the first whisper of stars is that faint thing
that candle sound too far away to read by

when you walk outside leaving the door ajar
and smell the various Danks of Dusk
                                                Alice Oswald, “A Star Here and a Star There”

My astronomy is as rusty as my childhood dinosaur knowledge, but I still love looking up at night. For a long while the only constellations I could reliably spot were the Plough and Orion (I remember a beery night as a student that ended in a long conversation with the hunter as I walked home). But a recent “term topic” at my daughter’s school has prodded a long-dormant interest back to life.

One of the joys of star gazing for me is the chance to be outside, to be looking, but not with any particular goal in mind, while the night world – normally shut out – moves around me. I get a faint tang of illicitness, as though I really ought to be looking down and in, like the people behind the curtains in the houses.

The recent eclipse and its TV coverage might get more people out in their gardens at night, but much as I enjoyed it, that kind of directed, “let’s learn about space” ethos isn’t quite what I go out for. Voyager, Rosetta, New Horizons and the coming solar orbiters are all fascinating, but I don’t take a telescope to the far end of the garden.

When the stars and sometimes planets move in and out of thin cloud, when the trees slightly bend to obscure two or three stars, when the eye is distracted by a pipistrelle bat being “a tea tray in the sky”, when a robin strikes up an out-of-kilter song from the black depths of the hedge, I feel that I’m really looking. The stars are no more than instances in a sea whose depth I can sense but cannot directly look at.

Can I follow the sequence of points that form Sagittarius, Draco or Aries? No, but I can draw my own lines. I can feel sparkles of ice in the breeze; or on a summer night it might be the dust-dry earth-breath as it releases the sun’s heat.

I live in the south of England: it’s therefore rare that the horizon is not dipped in the dye of a city. On every side, the blue-black directly above shades into pink-orange a few degrees above the rooftops. Like an “untouched wilderness”, a place without light pollution seems impossible.

I’ve been to one on a cloudless night – or one that’s at least close to pristine. In northwest Argentina, many years ago, we walked out from the village, as it then was, towards the bare desert. What lights there were faded as we passed  round a bend in the road.

The astonishing thing about the view overhead was that it had a three-dimensional quality. It felt as though we could see stars behind stars, the globular shape of clusters. Constellations were crowded with intermediate points that drew their own intricate forms against the dark. There seemed to be more stars than night.

In England, nothing has come close to that. There was a night in a B&B in Dorset where the sense of depth recurred, but in our years in London, in our back garden now, the stars have been cut back, like a public service, have become a compromise with streetlight.

Light pollution has troubling effects. The robin I hear singing may well believe it can see the dawn and needs to start fighting for its territory, wasting its energy. A recent paper in British Wildlife, “Reducing the Effects of Artificial Light” (K. Gaston et al, June 2014), lists a range of other effects on animal and plant behaviour, including changing foraging and breeding patterns, and makes several suggestions about how they could be reduced. One of the most instinctively appealing is an increase in the number of “dark sky reserves”, where other living things can respond to the light of the seasons, not of human activity.

I like this, but it seems impractical in the face of the inevitable objections, and because this is not a problem where it’s possible to draw a line and declare “¡no pasaran!” (see also: climate change, fertiliser/pesticide runoff, air pollution, plastic debris and others; the Chernobyl reactor container now being built seems like a very slow gate-slam after the horse has bolted). This needs to be tackled at source. The paper also suggests smaller things that would have a cumulative effect, such as simply drawing curtains in rooms where the lights are on, and reducing the amount of uplighting from streetlamps. And perhaps gleaming offices could really enter the modern era by switching off at least some of their lights at night (yes you, Canary Wharf).

But I am an urban dweller, always have been. My stargazing is always set against the city’s glow, is always buzzing with late-night roads. Perhaps that’s why it’s remained so incidental, satisfied with the stars that happen to be visible. Perhaps that’s why the sky’s shift into colour on the brim of the roofs’ horizon doesn’t trouble me until I think about it. Perhaps the fact that I know I can only see a few of the stars up there makes me imagine more, look harder for other potential worlds.