Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

  • @XeroxCool
    link
    English
    810 months ago

    The irony is that most of us live in a red/purple blob. A light pollution map pretty accurately matches population heat maps. The only outlier tends to be some resource mines, especially petroleum/gas fields with constant waste fires