Nightlight

This was written for 21W.775 Writing about the Environment and Nature (or some bullshit like that). I may change/update this in the future.

When my younger self was shooed off the television, I would look out the one window of our HDB flat that did not face the hallway, out at the Singaporean night sky. The other high-rises of the neighborhood framed my view on both sides. Below were the tops of big shade trees and shining street lamps.

I'd squint at the opening between the buildings. There were always a couple small blinking lights in the sky. I stared at them, hoping and hoping that they didn't move. Most of them moved. It's okay. There was always that one little bright dot at the same spot a little above the skyline, blinking at regular intervals. That must be the North Star. I would tell my parents about the star. They would tell me that what I saw was a plane. But it didn't move, so it couldn't have been a plane.

Singapore is the most light-polluted country in the world. It's not as crazy a statement as it sounds. Singapore is tiny: a little shy of 300 square miles, less than a third of Rhode Island; and it is dense: the third most dense nation (which again, is not that crazy as per the previous fact). With that context, maybe it's not so hard to believe that a nation that consists basically of one contiguous city is the most light-polluted country in the world.

I remember when my parents switched from satellite to cable TV. Instead of the same 10 local channels, half of which were in one of the three non-English national languages and another third always on news that did not matter to a primary schooler such as myself, I could browse through hundreds of channels. Hundreds of American channels.

I consumed my fair share of Austin and Ally and Jessie on the Disney channel, but what had me rooted onto our old dusty couch was National Geographic. Neil deGrasse Tyson's voice boomed as we explored the cosmos together, watching pulsars spin and galaxies collide.

My father refuses to drive at night in the States. Like Cinderella, we would be ushered to leave events and gatherings once the clock strikes 12 (well, in our case it was when the clock strikes 7 in the summer and 5 in the winter). I thought he was silly until I had to get my driver's license.

When we moved to Utah, my family bought a house in a recently-developed area. They were still building new homes further down the street, and that was where I practiced driving. On this evening, I pulled into the road with my father in the passenger seat beside me. We crossed the intersection and there were no street lamps or lit houses on this side. I could only see the few hundred feet ahead of me illuminated by my high-beams. Past that was nothing. Complete darkness.

I did two circles around the half-built houses and told my father I did not want to drive anymore. In the days thereafter, he asked me a couple times if I wanted to go practice night-driving. I vehemently refused. When I took the road test, I had to affirm that I did my 40 hours of driving practice, 10 of which after sunset. I looked the instructor straight in the eye and said yes.

The Land Transport Authority of Singapore maintains more than 110,000 street lamps. Twice a year, they drive a car with light sensors strapped on through every single public road to find dark spots. Then, they figure out how to get rid of them by improving or adding more street lamps. This number does not include the lighting that the Housing and Development Board (HDB) maintains in every walkway, park, and playground.

The moon looks larger in America, my father pointed out as we drove down Timpanogos highway. My mother looked up from her phone. I shifted in the backseat and peered through the windshield. There, in the valley between Mt. Timpanogos and Box Elder Peak was the full moon. It looked gigantic, so much bigger than the moon from my window on the seventh floor. It must be the elevation, I said.

It was not the elevation. Lehi, Utah is only 0.8 miles above sea level. The moon is about 238,900 miles away. That makes Lehi 0.0004% closer to the moon than Singapore is. Instead, this is because of a phenomenon (rather uncreatively) called moon illusion. It is an optical illusion where the moon appears larger when it is closer to the horizon.

There is not an explanation for moon illusion. It is an illusion that extends to other celestial bodies (namely, the sun) when they are near the horizon. Ptomely conjectured that it was because we perceived objects on the horizon as further away, and so in our minds, it must be a much larger object than the moon at its zenith (if two objects look the same size but one is further away, then you would guess that the farther one is larger). But it is not simply because there are objects in the foreground that we compare the moon to; astronauts experience moon illusion as well.*

So why was it that I did not see moon illusion in Singapore? Perhaps it's because I can't see the horizon. In whichever direction I look, I am met with tall trees or even taller buildings. Even to this day, I am unsettled by horizons that stretch on forever (living in Utah Valley was okay: there were always mountains on all four sides). I could only see the sun and the moon when they were overhead. I realize that people in Singapore don't talk about going to see the sun rise or set like they do in America. What a privilege I did not know I was missing.

*Footnote: The only source I can find for this is one sentence in a NASA article. It is unclear to me what a horizon for an astronaut is.

As I was thrust into the American schooling system, one of the first assignments that I had to do was to give a presentation on a constellation. I was given a long list and I picked Lyra, the first one that was not already picked (the other kids had picked the well-known ones like Sagittarius and Scorpius and Gemini).

Lyra consists of 5 main stars: four of them outlining a parallelogram and the last one extending outwards from a corner. This last one is the brightest star of the constellation, and one of the brightest in the summer night sky (if you live in the Northern hemisphere). It is called Vega, which comes from the Arabic phrase "the falling eagle." In old star maps, Lyra is drawn as an eagle holding a lyre.

I've always thought it was odd how the Greeks (and they were not the only civilization to do so) could look up at the stars and draw lines between them, giving them names and stories. When I look up at the stars from my backyard in suburban Utah, I just see a few tiny specks of light, too far away from each other to have any connection. I mean, I get that light pollution is a thing and all that jazz, but even if there were more tiny specks of light in the sky, how do you decide which ones to connect?

If you drive at night in the Mojave Desert towards Vegas, you will see a little bubble of orange and white on the horizon in the otherwise pitch-black landscape. It is the only source of light in this desert basin, and you can see Sin City from 50 miles away.

Skyglow refers to the brightness in the night sky arising from artificial light. Any light that is either directed or reflected upwards contributes to this phenomenon (and you might imagine how the former contributes much more). As the emitted light radiates upwards and passes through molecules and aerosols, it scatters a portion of it back towards the ground in the surrounding area.

Skyglow is the reason why you cannot see stars in urban areas.

"These stupid cars gotta stop driving by with their fucking headlights on max." Gwyneth waved a fist at the cars pulling into the parking lot of the Harmony Borax Works interpretative trail. We were visiting Death Valley for fall break. It's a great time to go, when the weather isn't so hot.

We chose Death Valley for the night photography. Gwyn was trying to get a shot of the decrepit mines against a backdrop of stars. She fiddled once more with the controls of the fancy camera she borrowed from her father, muttering about exposure times.

I lied down on the trail with my jacket underneath me. Ryan lied down a little ahead of me on the trail, so as to not block the path. We had just finished helping Gwyn set up her tripod, holding our phone flashlights out at it. I listened to the beeping of the camera and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark.

There are the bright stars that are easy to see. There are dim stars that could have been figments of my imagination. Slowly, the dim stars shined brighter, and more dim stars filled the space in between. Thousands of white dots filled the sky, and the desert night was not so dark anymore. It was spectacular.

And there, running southeast to northwest was a smear of white on the sky. On this band lay so many stars. Holy shit. That was the Milky Way. I thought the Milky Way was impossible to see with the naked eye. I thought that there was so much light pollution in the world that it was no longer possible. I thought the only way to see it was with expensive cameras and doctored photos.

I felt absolute awe. Awe that sat in my heart and quieted my mind. I understood at that moment how the people who lived hundreds of years ago looked up at the sky and believed that there was a heaven above them. This night sky we were under was so unbelievable it must be the hand of a god.

"Where is the Big Dipper?" Ryan wondered aloud, breaking me out of my trance. "It should be on the horizon."

She held her phone up to the sky. "Okay, so I see Ursa Major that way."

I sat up to look at where she was pointing. "Where?" I asked.

"You see that box over there?" Ryan pointed but I could not tell exactly where she was pointing to. I blinked at the stars.

"Ugh, I can't find the Big Dipper on here." Ryan swiped around on her phone.

"Isn't Ursa Major the Big Dipper?" I said, quietly, because I was unsure. I had not touched astronomy since middle school science, some 7 years ago. I unlocked my phone and opened Google. It told me that I did not have internet connection.

"It looks like a bear on this stargazing app," Ryan continued, staring intently at her screen.

"Doesn't Ursa mean bear?" Gwyneth added.

Whatever animal the Big Dipper is supposed to be, it didn't seem to me that it would be a bear. I must have misremembered. I looked through the apps on my phone. Indeed, the stargazing app that I downloaded years ago was still there. I opened it, hoping that it worked without service. It did.

I brought my phone up to the sky and pointed it at Ursa Major. It was a much, much larger constellation that I had expected. I had to move my head slightly to comfortably see all of it. I don't know why, but I had always expected constellations to be like those small drawings you saw on your screen.

"I'm pretty sure that's the Big Dipper. It looks like a pot right?" I said, tracing with my hands the constellation.

"Oh my god, yeah the Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major," Ryan read aloud the search results from the service that she was miraculously getting.

"We're stupid," I remarked. We stared at the Big Dipper. "So which one's the North Star? Isn't it part of the Big Dipper?"

"No, it's part of the Small Dipper," Ryan answered.

"And where's the Small Dipper?" I asked.

"So you see the front of the pot? Like, not the handle. You just trace that end going up and you should hit the Small Dipper. The Small Dipper goes the other way facing the Big Dipper." Ryan showed me her phone.

I traced the front of the pot upwards and hit a star that looked somewhat bright. I looked to its left and convinced myself that there was an upside-down pot there. Huh, so that was the North Star. It's a lot dimmer than I thought it would be.

Epilogue

As I was researching for this piece, I came across an article about light pollution in Singapore. The author talked about how it was not possible to see the stars from most places in Singapore. He talked about how he treasured the moments where he went on vacation and was able to see the stars. He wrote about how he "fret about how these affect the eyes of young children and the inability to look up at the stars in the sky might skew their sense of wonder and imagination." (It wasn't a very well-written article, in my opinion.)

I read that line and realized that I am one of those children that he's talking about. I grew up without stars. Did it affect my wonder, my imagination? I'd like to think that it didn't. But still, lying down on the warm sand in Death Valley, I felt something that I had never felt before. I understood truly for the first time in the 20 years of my life the sublimity of nature. I was filled with a childlike wonder for the natural world. A wonder that I have forgotten living my urban life.

It is a privilege to be able to see the stars, the Milky Way, the galaxies and distant worlds above us. We cannot squander it. We must protect our dark skies so those that come after us can see them too. So they can experience the absolute awe of the universe. So they do not wonder if the blinking cell tower in the distance is the North Star.