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from the headlights,-white-lines-and-black-tar-rivers dept.
A new atlas has illustrated that 80% of North Americans are prevented from seeing the Milky Way's bulge by light pollution:
The luminous glow of light pollution prevents nearly 80 percent of people in North America from seeing the Milky Way in the night sky. That's according to a new atlas of artificial night sky brightness that found our home galaxy is now hidden from more than one-third of humanity.
While there are countries were the majority of people still live under pristine, ink-black sky conditions — places such as Chad, Central African Republic and Madagascar — more than 99 percent of the people living in the U.S. and Europe look up and see light-polluted skies.
The country with the worst light-pollution is Singapore, where researchers found that "the entire population lives under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision." Other countries with large percentages of people living under skies this bright include Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377)
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday June 11 2016, @09:18PM
The sad thing is that they are not too far from areas with great night skies. On my first trip to California I wandered into Death Valley and was stunned by the amount of stars visible in the night sky. Coming from the northeast US I had never seen a night sky that clear. Yes the Milky Way was visible. On a later trip I camped there above 8000 feet and the skies were even more spectacular.