What our Skies Look like without City Lights

I sure miss the night skies of our growing up days in Hyderabad. I remember nights sitting on the terrace and the excitement when we could actually catch the milky way on a clear night, it's an unparalleled feeling. And the shooting stars you could spot ever so often, and the wonder at how they dissipate before they hit earth.  So mysterious and awe inspiring an experience, just sitting there and gazing up into a sky full of stars. It's almost like a time gone by now. The only time one can catch a glimpse now is if you can get an empty highway stretch at night and you switch off your headlights, and that's dicey obviously, but it's still so worth it :)

So this article by John Guida and photographs by Thierry Cohen, a French photographer, really caught my attention.

In his series “Darkened Cities,” he seeks to recover a little of the wonder of darkness through transporting photographs.

Each of these images consists of actual photos — plural — one for the city silhouette, the other for the wondrous sky. For the first, he shoots a city in“day for night” fashion, that is, by the preferably low light of a day for a view that looks like nighttime. For the next, he trots off to a faraway place on the globe with the same latitude, “mostly in deserts,” he said.

The series shows that “you have the same sky in two different geographical, economic spaces,” he said. “They are a link, a bridge.”

He says, “I am merging two different realities to create a third one that has become invisible.”

                                 New York 40° 44’ 39’’ N 2010-10-13 lst 0:04

Today, the Milky Way is indecipherable by the naked eye to two-thirds of Americans and about 90 percent of the world’s population. Many people consider this a profound loss — for our health and for our humanity.

“I address in particular the city dweller who forgets and no longer understands nature, To show him stars is to help him dream again.”says Cohen

He imagines some of the world’s largest cities — New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, among others — with all the lights turned out, mere silhouettes against sparkling night skies.

São Paulo 23° 33’ 22’ S 2011-06-05 lst 11:44

For the Sao Paulo photo, for example, he went to the Atacama Desert of South America to capture the night sky. The desert “is one of the driest places on earth, with the most exceptional night sky I have ever seen,” Mr. Cohen said. He made his way to the Yungay area, “the only lifeless ground on earth,” with “no rain in decades, just a few drops every 20 years.”

“I traveled there twice, in January 2010 during the preparation of the project, then more than a year after, in June 2011,” he explained. “My footprints were still remaining, like if I had left the day before.”

To capture New York City stars, he went to the Black Rock Desert, in Nevada 

For the final image, he uses digital post production “to bring back these skies into the city, to give overwhelming metaphorical and actual life to the sky light that we are letting disappear due to our increasingly urban way of life.”

Tokyo 35° 41’ 36’’ N 2011-11-16 1st 23:16

Mr. Cohen’s dreamy tableaus are not meant to be post-apocalyptic images, such as you might see in some recent movies (“Interstellar,” for example). Instead, he hopes that they encourage “a first approach to a scientific questioning, a starting point for human thought. If children do not see the night sky, they will lack an experience that is fundamental for humankind.”

Los Angeles 34° 06’ 58’’ N 2012-06-15 lst 14:52

Paul Bogard said: “When you have that firsthand, it can make you feel small, but it can make you grateful for what we have here, too. You realize the beauty we have on Earth is tremendous, and there’s no other place to go. The night sky makes this clear.”

Mr. Cohen echoed those sentiments: “In the last half a century, a large percentage of the inhabitants of our planet have ceased to be able to contemplate the beauty of the Milky Way. Almost the totality of its stars has become invisible in our skies.”

Paris 48° 50’ 55’’ N 2012-08-13 lst 22:15

New York 40° 42’ 16’’ N 2010-10-09 lst 3:40

Yet above all, Mr. Cohen sees his photographs in a philosophical light: “When a child discovers the stars, he begins to question,” he said. “What is it, who are we, where are we, and so on.