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mysteries. New episodes every Wednesday,

1:01

wherever you get your podcasts. What's

1:08

the darkest sky you've ever seen?

1:13

Probably in Morocco at the edge

1:15

of the Sahara Desert. Boy,

1:18

about 30 years ago, I woke

1:20

up in the middle of the night in a little

1:23

youth hostel and walked outside. My

1:26

first thought was that it

1:28

was snowing. Here I am in the middle of the

1:31

desert, but a good

1:33

Minnesota kid. I thought it was snowing, and it just

1:35

took me a second to realize that it was so

1:37

dark that I could just see more stars than I've

1:40

ever seen before. Paul

1:42

Bogart is a writer. The

1:45

best places to see a night

1:48

sky are where the air

1:50

is dry in deserts. That's

1:52

why a lot of the best

1:54

observatories are located in deserts.

1:57

I think of the night that I was in... the

14:00

first dark sky park, which

14:03

was in Southwest Scotland. Friend

14:05

of ours read it, a

14:07

90-year-old lady actually, and she said, well, we've got

14:10

dark skies. Why don't we find out about this?

14:14

In 2009, Galloway Forest Park in

14:16

southern Scotland became the UK's first

14:19

official dark sky park. The

14:22

designation came from a non-profit called

14:24

the International Dark Sky Association, which

14:27

was founded in the 1980s by two

14:29

astronomers, who wanted to protect the night

14:31

sky. Scotland

14:33

had to apply for Galloway to become a

14:35

dark sky park, and to

14:37

qualify, it had to make a light management

14:40

plan to ensure the park would stay dark.

14:43

And we thought, well, we don't have public street,

14:45

we don't have any street lighting, and we don't

14:47

have cars, we don't have an airfield. Joan,

14:51

her friend, the one who first read the Guardian

14:53

article, thought SARC could become

14:55

an official dark sky community, too. We'll

15:03

be right back. Support

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on Wondrey Plus. To

17:06

become an official dark sky island, Joe

17:09

Birch said they had to start by making

17:11

SARC even darker. The government

17:13

had to commit to dark sky friendly

17:15

lighting in all their buildings, which aren't

17:18

very many. One

17:20

way to make lights more dark sky friendly

17:22

is to give them motion sensors so they

17:24

only turn on when they're needed or

17:27

to point them toward the floor so less

17:29

light is directed into the sky. Were

17:32

the majority of the residents on SARC on

17:34

board? Yes, they were,

17:36

definitely. There were eight or nine who had

17:38

some rather dodgy lights, but

17:41

it is voluntary and it only applies to external

17:43

lights. So if you've got a light, say

17:46

a security light, provide it's not a timer

17:49

and it goes off, say at

17:51

10 o'clock, or if

17:53

it's only, if you get a passing cat

17:56

or a person, that's

17:58

permissible. So

18:01

this isn't as though you have

18:03

to put out blackout curtains on your

18:05

windows. No, no, no, no, no. No,

18:08

not at all. We're not

18:10

the light police. It is voluntary. Though

18:12

surprisingly, a couple of summers

18:14

ago there was somebody across from the observatory

18:16

who used to leave her kitchen light on

18:19

quite a lot without any curtains. So

18:21

we'd just phone her up and say, oh, you know, would

18:23

you mind just turning off the light? She was fine about

18:25

it. The

18:27

only problem, Joe remembers, was a local

18:30

pub that had strings of colored lights

18:32

hanging outside and hosted a disco

18:34

night every Tuesday. The owner

18:36

didn't want to change anything. But

18:39

eventually, the pub wasn't a problem

18:42

because a shrub grew so tall that you

18:44

couldn't see the lights anymore. In

18:48

2011, SARC was officially recognized as

18:50

the world's first dark sky island.

18:54

Ed Stone. The

18:56

thing that makes it unique is

18:58

that you'll get areas that are

19:00

dark sky protected

19:04

regions, particularly up in

19:06

Scotland and less densely populated areas. But

19:11

to enjoy the darkness, you kind of have to

19:13

go off and hike into the wilderness and camp

19:15

for a few days or kind of inconvenience yourself

19:17

somehow. The thing that

19:19

makes SARC really unique is that it is

19:21

a community, you know, it's an active community

19:23

and you can be in

19:25

the pub in the evening and on your

19:28

walk home you'll see the Milky Way stretching

19:30

above you because there's nothing in the way

19:32

of that darkness. People

19:35

started visiting just to experience the night

19:37

sky. The Irish musician

19:39

Enya read about SARC and recorded

19:41

an album called Dark Sky Island.

19:45

I mean, when you're saying it's really dark, there

19:48

are nights where I've gone

19:51

outside and been in a place that's

19:53

very dark. And it's almost,

19:56

if there are no stars or if it's cloudy, it's

19:58

almost hard to see. where

20:00

you're going in front of you. Is it that dark?

20:04

Well, you do adapt to the darkness.

20:06

That's the thing. It also depends very

20:10

much on the phase of the moon. So

20:12

tonight, for example, it'll be a full moon.

20:15

So it's very bright. When

20:18

you walk around in the evening, I'm

20:21

going for a barbecue on the beach later, which would

20:23

be good fun, but I have to clamber up a

20:25

cliff to get back home, which is a bit unsafe.

20:29

But doing that sort of thing, you won't need a

20:31

head torch because it's a full moon. And

20:33

it will be very, very bright to kind of

20:36

cast a shadow on the floor. So even when

20:38

it's a new moon, when there's no moon in

20:40

the sky, it

20:43

will be very dark then. But

20:47

you can still see because you'll

20:50

have starlight and

20:54

even the Milky Way. Essentially, if the Milky Way is

20:56

very bright and high and

20:58

your eyes are very good at seeing in the dark,

21:00

so it takes 20 minutes

21:02

or so for your eyes to really adapt

21:05

to the darkness. And

21:07

it's quite interesting that I very rarely use a

21:09

head torch in a certain cycling a lot way.

21:12

I just kind of wait for my eyes to adapt

21:14

and I can walk around anywhere. But when you have

21:16

visitors here, even when it's a full moon, people will

21:18

be walking around with a head torch on and

21:20

you kind of just get used to that need

21:23

for light. I don't know,

21:25

perhaps to feel safe or whatever it

21:27

might be or to see where your feet are going. But

21:30

then because your eyes are adapted to

21:32

the light, that's why everything else looks

21:34

so dark. If you kind of wait,

21:36

everything looks black and white, but you can see

21:39

plenty. Perhaps

21:41

I'm turning a little bit nocturnal though with

21:43

living on Sark for a few years and

21:46

doing lots of stargazing. You've

21:50

grown up, I mean, from the

21:52

time you were very young, you grew up in

21:55

this darkness. Do

21:57

you think you have a different relationship to darkness?

22:00

than others, just because of where

22:02

you've spent so much time. I

22:07

don't know, but I certainly get annoyed when

22:09

I see the huge amount of light pollution

22:11

that goes on around the Earth. You

22:14

must have seen photographs

22:17

of Earth from night. A

22:20

lot of it is completely wasted anyway. And

22:22

you know, something like 60% of

22:25

mammals are nocturnal. So I

22:28

feel quite strongly that we should be

22:30

minimizing the lights we have at

22:32

night. All the insects, bats,

22:35

mammals, they need the dark, you

22:37

know, for their lives, really. So

22:40

I suspect we probably do too. We

22:43

don't really perhaps recognise it. But

22:47

I don't know if I have a different relationship,

22:49

but I think, like lots of conservationists, I

22:51

feel that night should be dark. It's

22:56

odd, like, you know, whenever I'm in

22:59

the UK or in a well-lit area, I

23:01

wouldn't say I'm scared of the dark, but

23:03

I'm conscious of dark areas. They feel kind

23:05

of imposing and ominous in some way. You

23:08

know, you probably would choose not to walk down

23:10

a dark alley. You know, if you're in a

23:12

city, you'd probably take the long way around and

23:14

take the lit route. But here, where everywhere is

23:16

dark, I'm

23:18

often walking home from the observatory late

23:21

at night, which I have to walk

23:23

through a graveyard to get to, which sounds very

23:25

scary, but here, it's absolutely not. I've

23:27

never, never felt that fear of

23:30

the dark. I

23:33

think Ed described it very well. It's

23:35

nice. It's quiet. It's dark. You

23:37

feel that there's

23:40

no danger around. You

23:43

might stumble into somebody, but it's a bit unlikely. You

23:45

can hear them coming. No,

23:48

it just seems to us to be the natural state. I

23:51

mean, on a night on Sark, which has

23:54

a full moon or clear

23:56

conditions, would

23:58

you find many people... outside

24:00

looking up at the sky? Yeah,

24:03

definitely. It's more than

24:05

one occasion I found myself down on the beach

24:08

taking some photos of the Milky Way or

24:10

something and bumped into somebody else doing the

24:13

same thing, or often photographers who are visiting

24:15

the island. But if you

24:17

wander around late at night, you

24:20

do bump into other people. And

24:22

they're either stumbling home from the pub

24:24

in the summer months or they're out

24:26

taking photos of the stars, which I

24:28

quite like. We'll

24:34

be right back. Get

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That's

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atlassian.com,

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Atlassian. On

26:56

any night during migration season, there might

26:58

be hundreds of millions of birds flying

27:00

across the sky, just out of view.

27:04

Writer Paul Bogard. I

27:07

love the idea from Scott

27:09

Wiedensall, the great ornithologist and

27:11

writer who said that if

27:14

we could see nocturnal

27:16

bird migration, it would be the greatest

27:18

wildlife spectacle on the planet. Artificial

27:22

light is one of the biggest dangers

27:25

for migrating birds. Birds

27:27

have never evolved, of course, to

27:29

encounter artificial light at

27:31

night, and what we're

27:34

finding is that the lights draw them off

27:36

course. They confuse them. Birds

27:39

will be

27:41

drawn toward the lights. They'll circle the

27:43

lights, sometimes till exhaustion. Many

27:47

cities across the country have

27:50

implemented lights-out programs. In

27:52

2022, New York City Council enacted

27:54

a law that requires all buildings,

27:56

owned or leased by the city,

27:59

to turn off their lights. between

28:01

11 p.m. and 6 a.m. during

28:03

peak migration season. Other

28:06

cities in the U.S. have passed different kinds

28:08

of lighting legislation. Paul

28:10

says Tucson and Flagstaff, Arizona

28:12

are both good models. Flagstaff

28:15

passed its first lighting ordinance in 1958.

28:19

In the 80s, the city introduced lighting

28:21

limits in its zoning codes. This

28:24

is inspired by the fact

28:26

that these two cities are close

28:28

to astronomical observatories. But I think

28:30

that what's really

28:32

fascinating about it is that they've

28:35

had these ordinances for long enough that people

28:38

have grown used to it and

28:40

even to value it. And so

28:43

it just shows that big

28:45

American cities can actually

28:47

be lit more efficiently and

28:50

essentially darker than we're used

28:52

to, and life goes on quite well. In

28:56

2016, the National Park Service captured

28:59

images of light emissions at night

29:01

in Flagstaff and Cheyenne, Wyoming, a

29:03

city of about the same size.

29:07

Cheyenne's lights were 14 times

29:09

brighter than Flagstaff's. You

29:12

know, thinking about the Bortle scale, sometimes people, I think,

29:14

get the wrong impression that it

29:16

has to be a Bortle scale one

29:18

or two or even three before night

29:20

is beautiful. And I

29:23

say, no, those

29:25

are special experiences. But I

29:28

live in South Minneapolis right by the airport, and

29:30

it's probably a Bortle scale eight

29:33

or maybe at best a seven.

29:35

And I still go, I love going

29:37

into the park and it's still beautiful.

29:40

And so to find

29:42

a place where you will feel safe

29:45

and where you can get out and, you know, watch

29:49

the sunset and watch the night rise

29:52

and move over the overhead

29:54

and watch the first stars

29:56

come out. There's so much that we can do even when

29:58

we're in places like this. that are swamped

30:00

in artificial light. Ed

30:05

Stone from the Isle of Sark says

30:07

that he's gotten to know the night sky quite

30:09

well since moving to the island. Certainly

30:11

in terms of stargazing and knowledge

30:14

and experience and being

30:17

able to kind of navigate and orientate

30:19

myself by the night sky, I'm

30:23

able to do that quite easily

30:26

now. And you really get a

30:29

perspective for where you are in space by

30:32

following the night sky and get

30:34

this kind of, rather

30:37

than thinking of the world as this two dimensional

30:39

flat map that we have in our head, we're

30:41

very much a three dimensional ball flying

30:45

through space. Certainly, I think

30:48

certainly the past 100 years, surprisingly

30:50

recent in terms of human

30:52

history, artificial light has

30:56

grown exponentially, right? Since the,

30:59

well, even the 70s, like go back to the 50s and

31:02

it wouldn't be as light, but you go back 100 years, we

31:06

wouldn't have any of that. Everybody would

31:08

have known what the moon phase was and

31:10

would be very familiar with the night sky

31:12

and probably

31:15

lots of ancient stories, Greek

31:18

myths and things that you'd look up.

31:20

Everybody surely would have been fascinated by

31:22

it. And talked about these things

31:24

and would have known whether it's going to be light out

31:26

tonight or whether it's going to be dark out tonight. And

31:31

now all of that kind of skillset is just

31:33

kind of lost. It's a bit, almost a bit

31:35

weird if you know, if

31:37

you know these Greek myths or if

31:40

you know what the moon phase is,

31:42

that people think you're, I don't know,

31:44

some wacky individual, which is

31:47

a shame. Do

31:50

you ever take it for granted? I mean, have

31:52

you gotten used to this wonderful sky

31:54

that you get to see that so

31:57

many of, the

32:00

rest of us will never experience in our life. Does

32:02

it ever get old? It

32:05

is old. No, I like

32:07

it. I'm very happy to see it. I

32:09

sleep with the curtains open.

32:11

I just like to check on what's going out

32:14

there. I notice when the moon is full or

32:16

half full, or not showing at all.

32:19

Do you have any advice for people in

32:22

cities, in New York, for example, for how

32:25

to appreciate the darkness that they have, even

32:27

if they're in a city? Well,

32:30

I think it's very difficult if you're in a

32:32

city, particularly New York. I

32:35

mean, if you're a small town, it's

32:37

probably fairly easy to get out and

32:40

see the sky, but it really

32:42

isn't very easy. I suppose if you went to

32:44

the middle of Central Park, you'd certainly see the

32:46

most prominent planets. You'd probably see

32:49

Jupiter and Saturn if they

32:51

were visible and you would see the moon.

32:53

But I don't really know what

32:55

you do if you live in a big city like yours. Sounds

33:00

like you're kind of screwed. Well,

33:04

can I say it? You

33:06

can't get them to turn the lights off. The lights

33:08

off in New York, they'd hate it. What

33:12

can you see in the SARC night

33:14

sky that you can't see elsewhere? I

33:18

think just more of it, more

33:21

clearly. We can see the ISS

33:23

International Space Station pass.

33:25

We can see the planets if they're up. We

33:28

have one or two nice eclipses or

33:30

lunar eclipses. We

33:34

can see more stars. That's really what it's all

33:36

about. Just see more of what is there. It's

33:41

not like we're druids dancing

33:43

around stone hinge. But

33:46

we have had sky

33:49

festivals and visiting speakers and

33:51

people have taken part in that. I think

33:54

quite honestly, I think they take it for granted. They

33:56

just enjoy it. I think that's nice. And

33:59

if there's a comet. around. I mean I've been to

34:01

a couple of comet parties. Make

34:03

a point of just hanging out and waiting to

34:05

see the comet. AMT

34:08

Well I'd like to be invited to

34:10

a comet party. I didn't think

34:12

there was ever such a thing in the world. But

34:14

that sounds like a great idea for a party. DR.

34:17

YARDLEY I think you can have any sort of party.

34:19

AMT Ha ha ha ha. MUSIC

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part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover

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more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is

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love. This

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Is Love. Support

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for This Is Love comes from

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says it's like nothing else on TV. It's

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Therapy is now streaming with the Paramount+. Paramount

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