Going Out Out
Adventures in the wilderness
Looking up at the desert night sky I caught sight of a shooting star. “How beautiful,” I thought and also how lucky to catch a glimpse.
Twenty seconds or so later there was another shooting star.
This time it tracked almost the full length of the night sky. “Wow!” I thought, “That was really quite something!
I was still gathering my thoughts…and wondering what to do with my wonderment…when a third shooting star streaked overhead and I started to question whether I was actually awake or in a dream.
It wasn’t long before the chafing load on my shoulders (most impolitely) reminded me that I was, in fact, awake.
Not just awake, but at work.
Sea Soldier & BMX Bandit
I was on exercise with the Royal Marines in one of the great desert wadis of Jordan. We were on a night patrol and I was tail-end-charlie and the chafing was thanks to a mixture of sand, sweat and the weight of my FFO (full fighting order).
Clearly bored with pretending to be on the lookout for an imagined enemy my mind and eyes took to wandering the night sky above. Probably my most cherished experiences of commando life involved just being stood outside in remote environments.
I’d never seen a sky like the one in Jordan. The starscape seemed to be 3-dimensional and the shooting stars were just a constant stream. I wondered how this could possibly be the same sky as the one I rode under on my BMX in the 80s.
What is Poverty?
For the first time in my life, I had a sense of being impoverished.
It was like my childhood had been robbed of something and I wasn’t even aware of the fact. Which was weird feeling because my childhood was amazing.
I think that if someone told me that clear skies were my birthright, I’d probably roll my eyes and think they were being dramatic, but this is certainly how it felt…on a fundamental level, we should all have access to these views.
Light Pollution
How could this sky be the same sky and yet be so, otherworldly?
The answer is light pollution.
I didn’t know it at the time but 75% of Jordan is comprised of desert, with 90% of the kingdom’s population tucked into the northwest region. Travel south and you quickly move into hundreds of kilometres of dark zone.
In contrast, my hometown of Gateshead has a little shy of 200,000 folks living in it and our sister city over the river, Newcastle; is a little shy of 300,000.
*500,000 total which is comparable to small US cities such as Louisville, Kentucky; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and San Antonio, Texas.
Even if…like me, you’re not great with numbers, you might just have some sense of how much light half a million humans throw up into the sky at any given time. A few thousand, midnight pees here, and a few hundred nightshifts there, and all those street lamps in between.
Don’t Chortle at the Bortle
Writing this essay I’ve learned that scientists have attempted to quantify (of course they have) the relative darkness of our skies; enter, the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale.
Gateshead comes in at 7…but that won’t mean much until we’ve got some reference points.
1-9
The Bortle scale is a 9-part logarithmic scale with 9 being the absolute light-pollution pits…scientifically speaking.
Each step up in class represents a tenfold increase in light pollution. This means that a Class 9 sky
is 100 times brighter than a Class 8 sky, and 1,000 times brighter than a Class 7 sky.
You’d think we’d be hard-pressed to get up to 9 and almost entirely blot out the night sky, but somehow humans have managed it. Yay, humans.
It depends exactly where you are in and on any given night there could be variances, but generally speaking major urban areas such as London/New York/Tokyo are Level 9.
So it would appear with my class 7 childhood sky, I grew up relatively rich compared to some others…
Northumberland’s Famous Dark Skies
Now that we live in Northern Northumberland with the North Sea flanking our east and the Cheviot hill ranges the west, my own children, as fortune would have it, get to feast on a Level 4 which is considered a ‘dark sky’.
It’ll be news even to the folks who live in Northumberland that we have some of the darkest skies in Europe and indeed the largest area of protected sky in Europe. A large observatory was built in Kielder - to take advantage of these Level 3 skies.
The Kingdom of Jordan
So how does my new home in Northumberland compare to the Jordanian desert. Was it possible my memory, as memeories do, just played a trick on me?
Well, it turns out that whilst the Northumberland skies are spectacular, the great wadi regions of Jordan are home to some of the darkest skies in the world, with a Bortle class of 1 or 2. This means that the Milky Way is clearly visible to the naked eye, and even faint nebulae and star clusters can be seen.
In my experience, it also means you can see a shooting star every other minute which means the sky is not the static sleepy distant blackness we imagine but rather it’s alive and busy and tangibly on our doorstep.
Next Steps
Here’s a link to a website so you can check your own night sky; there’s even an app available - Clear Outside
Maybe if you live in zones 6-9 you might want to consider a pilgrimage to a zone 3-4 dark sky or even see what options you have for the ultimate 1-2 zone skies.
Yours in wonderment,
Manos
x
PS - Spend a couple of nights with me under dark skies at my wake up in the woods retreat in a couple of weeks!
Ooo we’re a 5! Interesting to know 😆
Good one Dave!