Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.
A few years ago, I moved from Chicago to a medium sized city in Colorado. Even with the light pollution we have in my city, the stars are still great. In Chicago I was lucky to see fifteen stars on a clear night.