OFTEN WHEN A COMET PASSES or another astronomical marvel unfolds above Seattle, it’s hidden behind a fuzzy shroud—the sky glow of the city’s lights bouncing off its endemic cloud cover. On February 20, the moon was to undergo its last full eclipse for nearly three years, with the bonus of the ringed planet Saturn and the bright star Regulus attending beside it. All day, clouds had rolled across the sky; they were expected to set in after nightfall. Instead the clouds parted and the heavens opened, revealing as clear and deep a sky as I’ve ever seen over this town.
I determined not to waste the chance; I would view this eclipse through the lens of a powerful telescope. This is easy to do in Seattle, even if you don’t own one, thanks to a charming idiosyncrasy of astronomy buffs: The only thing they like more than beholding the wonders of the universe is sharing those wonders with perfect strangers. Here in the city, the Seattle Astronomical Society holds monthly parties on the north shore of Green Lake. The astronomical revelers were not at their usual spot just west of the Bathhouse theater, however, so I wandered along the shore, out onto the grassy peninsula that bulges into the lake’s northwest corner, about as dark a patch of land and water as you can find within the city, and even darker with the moon fully covered by Earth’s shadow.
In this darkness, the eclipsed moon was magnificent, a smoldering orange fading to glowing gray.
Three moon widths away, Saturn and Regulus hung at the nine and twelve o’clock positions. By Seattle standards the sky was profuse with stars. Overhead stretched a diaphanous swath of the Milky Way, the disk-shaped galaxy of 200 billion or so stars in which our Earth lies. By wilderness standards it was a skim-milk version, thin and attenuated, but I still gasped; it was the first time I had ever seen the original Great White Way in Seattle.
On a hunch I headed down to the boathouse at the lake’s southwest corner and found the star party gathered there. The terrain at the Bathhouse site blocked the view of the moon rising, so they’d moved to the boathouse side. But there, two of the tall poles holding the lights that ringed the nearby parking lots—called “cobra heads” because of their arching, hooded shape—were askew, and they shot light at the shore where the stargazers were gathered. The boathouse was decked with small, unshielded bulkhead lights shining in every direction. Outmatched by the boathouse glare, the moon and Saturn and Regulus no longer shone quite so bright. And the Milky Way had disappeared.
Living in cities, we spend our waking days and nights bathed in varying degrees of illumination; even when we sleep, streetlights leak in our windows and the LEDs on our clocks and video players blink and glow. True darkness, like true silence, feels strange, exhilarating, even disconcerting.
Through nearly all of human history, the Milky Way was a nightly presence, in town and country alike. Into the early twentieth century, even residents of Manhattan could see it. Then two events forever altered the night sky: In 1879, Thomas Edison created the first commercially viable incandescent bulb—in effect, invented the electric light. And on March 31, 1880, someone in Wabash, Indiana, flipped a switch, sending power from a threshing-machine-driven dynamo to four powerful carbon arc bulbs mounted on the town’s courthouse dome—and Wabash became the first electrically lit city in the world. “The strange, weird light, exceeded in power only by the sun, rendered the square as light as midday,” one witness recounted. “Men fell on their knees, groans were uttered at the sight, and many were dumb with amazement. We contemplated the new wonder of science as lightning brought down from the heavens.”
The incandescent age came to Seattle on March 22, 1886, when Edison’s agents fired up a steam-powered generator on Jackson Street, turning on the first electric light west of the Rockies—presumably to a similar breathless reception. Artificial light spread like wildfire, and men ceased falling to their knees at the wonder of it: “Lightning brought down from the heavens” is now as commonplace as plastic and internal combustion, two other legacies of the same era.
In 2001 an Italian astronomer named Pierantonio Cinzano devised an eye-opening “World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness.” By his estimation, two-thirds of Americans, half of Europeans, and a fifth of people worldwide can no longer see the Milky Way. One study found that three-quarters of Canadians had never seen it. Nighttime satellite photos tell the tale. A few big swaths of Earth slumber peacefully in darkness: Antarctica and the Arctic, Amazonia and the Australian outback, the Gobi, Kalahari, and Sahara deserts. Vast developed areas—virtually all of Europe and India, for example, and most of the contiguous United States—look uncannily like the Milky Way, flecked with dots and smears of light. The largest metropolises blaze like supernovas. Seattle is a next-tier nova, the biggest, brightest hot spot on the continent west of Alberta and north of San Francisco.
Light from the city spills out over its neighbors, as David Ingram, the genial vice president of the Boeing Employees’ Astronomical Society, discovered when he was invited to conduct a stargazing party at Vashon Island’s Harbor School. “There was no way we could do a star party there,” he says. “The sky glow from Seattle was overwhelming. We had to go to Nike Park, on the opposite side of the island, to get a decent sky.” Craving such a sky, the Seattle Astronomical Society tried for several years to acquire a 10- to 20-acre “star park” in Central Washington where members could convene, camp, and, most important, see the stars. A secretive sponsor offered to match donations for the purchase with the stipulation that the site be within three hours’ drive of Seattle. Otherwise, notes SAS vice president Greg Scheiderer, some members would gladly “drive to north Saskatchewan for a black sky.” At first that restriction seemed to present no problem. “But places that were dark aren’t dark anymore,” says Scheiderer. “A lot of folks thought Cle Elum would be good. But there’s more and more development there.” Likewise the Ellensburg and Wenatchee areas. This spring the astronomical society gave up trying to find an affordable site near enough and dark enough to serve as a star park. It scuttled the project and refunded donors’ money.
Ask local stargazers where this metropolis’s brightest, most overbearing lights are, and they’ll probably tell you about “Michael’s Nebula.” Michael’s Toyota, aka Toyota of Bellevue, is a snazzy auto dealership at the junction of Interstate 90 and 148th Avenue Southeast. Above its well-stocked lot stand scores of high poles stacked with floodlights. They blaze so brightly Dave Ingram claims “you can find it by the sky glow”; you can certainly read the fine print in a car contract there. The Subaru dealership a few hundred feet away is nearly as bright.
Published: June 2008
