Crying over spilt light - a lament about light pollution

A beautiful view of the Milky Way at Wilsons Promontory
Alex Cherney  www.terrastro.com

A reader of my complaints about Canberra's chronic light pollution wrote to me with a poem she wrote about exactly that.

Penelope Cottier points out that about one-fifth of the world's population can no longer detect the Milky Way with the naked eye due to light pollution. (Reported in Cosmos magazine, August/September 2009.)

Light pollution simulation http://stellarium.org/features_in_0.10.0.php

And as she wrote to me, the poem raises the irony that we can find great images of stars on-line, yet we are losing the ability to see them for ourselves due to our reliance on technology.

Crying over spilt light 

Obesity of light blankets black,
clogs the arteries of recognition.
Blindness comes from the stroke
of too easy ignition; the fatty candle
of conjoined cities chokes imagination.
No matter; search the lost skies
by screen's unblinking gaze,
and rediscover what Neanderthals
once mind-wandered quite for free.
Erasure of night by carrion globe,
pecking out eyes of speculation.


- P.S. Cottier
   First published in The Specusphere


You can read more of Penelope's writings on her blog.