At 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994, residents of Los Angeles were jolted awake by a 6.7-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 60 people, crumpled buildings and freeways, swallowed automobiles, ignited fires and caused a blackout. That last effect, plunging the city into darkness, prompted dozens of residents to call the city’s Griffith Observatory because of something weird they saw in the night sky: the Milky Way.
“The lights of Los Angeles were out,” recalls E.C. Krupp, the longtime director of the observatory, “so the night sky was dark for a change. People were puzzled and wondered if there was a connection between the earthquake and the strange sky. We figured out they just weren’t used to seeing so many stars.”
A global atlas of the night sky, published in June, found that 80 percent of humanity now lives under light-polluted skies. That even takes into account inky-dark countries like ...
