naturalfeature:alabama hills

Falling in Love With the Dark - Issue 27: Dark Matter
▻http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/falling-in-love-with-the-dark

http://static.nautil.us/2831_4ea6a546c19499318091a9df40a13181.png

If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for 2 hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents under the brow of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills, a field of boulders near Death Valley. We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a 3 on the Bortle Scale, the 9-level numeric metric of night sky brightness. Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to (...)

Falling in Love With the Dark - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/falling-in-love-with-the-dark

http://static.nautil.us/2831_4ea6a546c19499318091a9df40a13181.png

If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for 2 hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents under the brow of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills, a field of boulders near Death Valley. We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a 3 on the Bortle Scale, the 9-level numeric metric of night sky brightness. Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to (...)