My daughter Evvy and I went outside two hours before dawn on Monday to watch for shooting stars. It had been a relatively warm night, that is, just above freezing, and the sky was clear. A fraction of a yellow crescent moon could be seen in the trees to the east, just above the horizon. We stretched on the upper deck to wait.
The Ursid meteor shower gets its name from the constellation Ursa Minor, from which it seems to radiate. The burning bits of rock and dust sliding through the Earth’s atmosphere are the long trail of debris from comet 8P/Tuttle, which will pass close to our planet in 2021. This week’s meteors are like the shedding scales of some great celestial fish sloughed off centuries ago, which we are just now plowing through.
Evvy and I each saw two meteors in the 15 minutes we were out on the deck. This was a fairly good outcome for an event that might produce only 10 to 20 of the short, fast darts of light an hour.
The night view from our house on the flat Napeague isthmus has always been good, but there is a lot more artificial light in the sky than there used to be. To the west and north, a faint white glow serves as a hedgerow on the horizon. Above Amagansett, the haze reaches up like a dome. There is a glow from far across Long Island Sound, too, coming from the direction of New London, Conn.
None of the light intrusions into the heavens is so great yet to interfere greatly with our watching the stars, but the glow over the horizon is growing stronger. Our eyes are better at picking up cooler blue white light of the sort put out by ultra-bright LEDs. It is possible that the light pollution we see is less the result of more development than from the switch to energy-saving new fixtures.
It’s a tradeoff, I suppose. If more efficient lighting will help slow climate change, I can accept a bit more of a pale haze at the sky’s margins.