I was watching a show on National Geographic about how time was kept during ancient times. The basic gist of it was that the ancients used the skies (sun, moon, stars) to calculate what time of year it was. The point was that we no longer use that since we have clocks, calenders etc and modern people rarely look up at the sky. They mentioned that after the Northridge Earthquake all the lights of Los Angeles went and the local observatory received many phone calls of people asking what those lights in the sky were. Apparently there were thousands of them. What people were asking about were the stars!
Did people really not know that the stars were there?
I think they probably knew what stars were, but that they were unused to the number of them due to light pollution. Since you can see so many more stars than you’re used to, you might think something else is involved.
I was amazed at the difference of the night sky between suburban Philadelphia and the sky in the Rocky Mountains. I knew light pollution was a factor and made some stars invisible, but I had no idea of the number of stars you could see in an unpolluted night sky.
A number of years ago, there was mention of a girl in Harlem (NYC) who didn’t know that you can look up at the sky and see the moon. She said nobody ever told her, and she didn’t have any reason to look at the sky anyway.
If you are used to seeing the sky from a large city, and then to suddenly see the Milky Way in all its glory, it can be gloriously unsettling. And yes, there must be lots of people who wouldn’t make the connection.
Yeah, one thing I like to do when I take visitors (who usually are city people) to places like Yosemite is to have them look up at the sky after it gets dark. I almost always get a big reaction, like a gasp. The stars are incredibly more numerous , and more beautiful, than what they are used to
I suspect that there is an element of hyperbole in the story, but the night sky is a lot more spectacular than one might expect living only in cities or even small towns. I grew up in a small city and was used to a night sky that had stars scattered randomly everywhere, but was surprised both by seeing the sky from very rural areas (where you can see the milky way) and very urban areas (where the sky is solid black).
Not surprised enough to call an observatory to complain about something being wrong with the universe mind you, but that’s probably an L.A. thing.
I remember once in college, walking back from the office after dark. It was a clear night, and so naturally I was craning my head to appreciate the view. Some guys were sitting around on the porch of the dorm, and asked me what I was looking at. “The stars.” “Oh, are the stars out?” When they were sitting right there, and could have seen for themselves with a glance.
Yeah, I’ll believe that some folks really don’t know what stars are.
I had a telescope as a kid, and was a really interested in astronomy. I knew what the Milky Way was, and how it was named.
Then at 3:00 AM on a moonless winter morning, sixty miles out in the empty desert, I got out of a truck, and was left by a gate in a fence. My sense of wonder went into overdrive from the first glimpse, and as my eyes really became adjusted to the darkenss over the next hour, I was entirely overwhelmed.
I could see by the starlight!
Awe doesn’t begin to describe it. Sunrise lasted for an hour and a half. This is one of the greatest visual memories in my life.
I knew what I was seeing, but was still entirely surprised by it.
The first time I realised why it was called the Milky Way was when I visited rural VA and a clear warm night saw the sky clearly for perhaps the first time in my life.
I’ve read this story somewhere before. From what I remember, the story was that people were calling about the giant white cloud in the sky, asking if it was related to the power outage and if they should be concerned, the cloud in question being the Milky Way. I’ll try to see if I can find it when I get home tonight.
I was in the Los Angeles area during the Northridge earthquake. All the lights did not go off. (I dare say some did, but not enough to make a huge difference to the sky.)
Although it is certainly true that big city light pollution (not to mention L.A. smog) can have a big effect on how many stars you can see, this story screams urban legend. Likewise the story about the girl in New York who had never seen the moon. Even in big city skies, the moon is big and bright enough to force itself on anyone’s attention. Both stories, apart from their inherent implausibility, point far too nice a moral (about how modern urban Americans are not only stupid, but are estranged from Mother Nature, or something) to be true.
According to Isaac Asimov, everybody in LA should have gone mad. (But then, who’d notice?)
This is actually the element of the story that makes me think it either isn’t true or is extremely exaggerated. If people didn’t know what they were seeing, how could the know the appropriate place to call about it. If the story was that people were calling the police or the airport, I’d give it more faith.
I live in an urban area and I’m amazed at how many stars I can see when I visit my family who live in a rural area. And I grew up in that rural area.
That said, I doubt anyone was unaware of what the stars were. If people were making phone calls it was probably about the unusual appearance of the sky and they were asking if this unusual clarity was a problem.
Rather true. I’ve spent most of my life in the suburbs of DC. I’ve been west to Appalachia (VA/WV), around the Mid Atlantic coast, and I didn’t really experience the stars as an adult until I took a trip to Maritime Canada and stopped the car in a rural area near the sea and saw The Milky Way in all it’s glory.
And anyway, the OP says that the Observatory was receiving the calls. How would people know to call the observatory if they weren’t familiar with the night sky? I don’t even know the number of any local observatories (though I know that the US military has one here and a major university has another).
