Having spent the last two times in Las Vegas on the infamous Strip, with all its mega hotels and huge casinos, I decided to go for a more down to earth version (if that is truly possible in Las Vegas) by staying at the Golden Nugget in the old downtown part known as Freemont Street. This is where it all started and so why not go there. Recently they have overhauled this section of the city to breath new life into what was fast becoming a place of the past. It seems like it has worked fairly well. One of the ways in which they have done this is by adding a four block cover over Freemont Street. Every 1 hour of so after dark this canopy lights up with millions of little lights, a variable sky of lights.
As I gazed at this canopy which obscured my view of the sky, I couldn’t help remember that only the night before I had been at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah looking up at the stars as they lit up the canopy of the sky. That night in Bryce Canyon I could see a thick band of what looked like dust cresting across the sky. The park ranger had explained to my parents earlier that this was the Milky Way streaking across the sky, the result of millions of stars closely packed together.
Flare in the Milky Way over Utah
But what he also explained afterwards was disturbing. At this point in time only 40% of the world is able to see what I saw just the other night because light pollution had virtually blotted out the stars from our view.
With that in mind I saw the Freemont light show with new eyes. Here, in a city that has a spotlight so bright that it can be seen from outer space, a city that pollutes the sky with so much light that when I looked out the hotel window the only stars I saw were the ones displayed on the adjacent billboard, they had gone so far as to create their own night sky out of little LED’s.
As if destroying the absolutely awe inspiring night sky wasn’t enough we feel the need to replace it with a tacky light show. We love to pretend to be God but we sure are lousy at it.
2 responses so far ↓
SjG // September 12, 2009 at 5:01 am |
This reminds me of my undergrad astronomy professor lamenting the ever increasing amount of light pollution obscuring our vision of the night sky. I think you’ll like Telkwa.
Cory // September 12, 2009 at 1:13 pm |
And this reminds me of that night in Berenty when Sean and I stayed up past lights-out. It was incredible!
Nice obserevation about wanting to replace God and Nature with something tacky that we made.