Far too many people have no idea what a good night sky looks like. Our vision of the universe is spoiled by the effects of light pollution. The streetlights, headlights, and neon lights of modern life work together to blot out the stars, planets, and gas clouds of the Milky Way. This graphic showing the from Stellarium.org, the free open source planetarium, is a great way to see how degraded our view of the night sky can get by light pollution.

 

 

Stellarium is incorporating a light pollution simulation into the latest version of the planetarium program. Swing by, download it, and try it out.

 

 

Are you on Twitter? Follow me (@sheagunther) there, I give good tweets.

 

And if you really like my writing, you can join my Facebook page.