SAVING STARLIGHT

Northern Lights over Silver Creek Pond at Shades State Park

The damp air sat heavy in the ravine. Sugar Creek rushed cold over the eroded limestone, smelling faintly of wet earth and pine needles. That is what Shades State Park feels like at 2:00 AM. I was standing in the mud with my girlfriend, Claire, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the pitch black. We came out here in May to escape the grid. We wanted the dark.

We got a solar storm instead.

The sky fractured. Shifts of neon green and bruised violet pulsed overhead in absolute, eerie silence. The surrounding oaks stood as black monoliths against a burning atmosphere. I had just finished Johan Eklöf’s The Darkness Manifesto, a brutal look at how our obsession with artificial light is wiping out nocturnal ecosystems. Watching the aurora borealis bleed across a Midwestern sky, I realized how rare true darkness has become. We are erasing the night, and we don't even realize what we're losing.

Field Notes: Shooting the Midwest Aurora

You do not need a plane ticket to Iceland to shoot the Northern Lights. You need patience, a dark sky map, and a fast lens. I shot this event with a 14mm f/1.8. Lock your tripod down into the dirt. Manually focus on the brightest star you can find. Stop trusting your autofocus in the dark. Catch more behind-the-scenes setups on my Instagram.

The Urban Death Trap

Drive an hour south to Bloomington. The sky hangs low like an oxidized orange canopy. Streetlights hum. The relentless noise of a college town drowns out the quiet. Up north in Indianapolis, billboards bleed aggressive blue light into the clouds. The city never actually sleeps. We think light equals safety. To the local ecosystem, it means chaos.

Entomologists call it "The Vacuum Cleaner Effect." Moths, beetles, and hundreds of other nocturnal insects are sucked out of the woods and pinned against buzzing floodlights. They orbit the glare until they drop from exhaustion. It is a nightclub with no exit, and the bouncers are hungry predators waiting on the pavement.

The Essential Role of Moths

Milky Way on display at Negwegon State Park in Michigan

Among the insects drawn to artificial light, moths stand out for their ecological importance.

Look at the Milky Way over Negwegon State Park. Under that kind of absolute blackness, moths go to work. We ignore them. We favor butterflies because they operate in the daylight and look better on hiking brochures.

But moths are the blue-collar overachievers of the insect world. Fiona Matthews, Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex, points out that moths actually pollinate flowers at a faster rate than day-flying insects. They handle the heavy lifting for Indiana’s evening primrose and wild petunia. The yucca plant relies so completely on the yucca moth that without it, the plant ceases to reproduce. They also pollinate our agricultural backbone: soybeans, pumpkins, apples, pears, alfalfa, and grapes.

A 2017 study by German entomologists tracked a 75% drop in flying insect biomass over 27 years. That is not a minor shift. That is a systemic collapse. When insect populations crash, nutrient cycling stalls, plant reproduction halts, and the predators that rely on them starve.

Consequences for Bat Populations

When the insect populations crash, starvation moves up the food chain. As the humidity settles over the Indiana woods each evening, bats drop from their roosts to hunt. They are the ecosystem's brute-force balancers. Take the Indiana bat. It is an endangered species, hanging onto survival by a thread, yet it still acts as a massive, unpaid pest control force. A single colony consumes millions of insects a night. That appetite drastically reduces our reliance on spraying agricultural fields with chemical pesticides. Scott Haulton, a Forestry Wildlife Specialist for the Indiana DNR, estimates that bats save farmers around $900 million annually by preventing crop damage. Nine hundred million dollars. Yet they still have a worse PR team than cockroaches.

We are actively killing them with the glow of our subdivisions. We flood the forest edges with halogens and LED streetlamps, completely overriding their natural navigation. Light pollution strips them of the dark they need to survive. They struggle to hunt. They fail to locate mates in the glare. They cannot migrate. When a fragile, endangered species cannot navigate its own habitat, it stops reproducing, and the entire local food web destabilizes. It is the ecological equivalent of being trapped in a room where someone is aggressively strobing the lights. It’s disorienting, panic-inducing, and entirely unnatural. We are blinding the night shift.

Dimming the Cosmic Connection

The crushed coral sand at Ka’ena Point sticks to everything. It is the absolute edge of Oahu, a jagged spit of volcanic rock thrust out into the Pacific. The ocean slams against the basalt cliffs with a brass drop that fills the air. With the moon hidden and the glow of Waikiki entirely blocked by the mountains, the sky opens up. It becomes a heavy, endless sheet of ancient light.

Looking up at it forces you into a state of wonderful insignificance.

Perhaps one of the most profound losses brought about by light pollution is less tangible and more existential. Once a universal part of the human experience, the night sky has become obscured for much of the world’s population. The stars have historically held immense cultural, navigational, and spiritual significance. They have inspired art, guided explorers across oceans, and helped farmers determine planting and harvesting seasons.

When you look up at the night sky, you see the universe as it was before you were born and as it will be after you die. It’s a connection to the cosmos that transcends generations. As Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Yet, as cities expand and the night grows artificially brighter, this cosmic view becomes increasingly reserved for those who can venture far from urban centers.

Efforts to reclaim the night sky are gaining momentum worldwide. Dark Sky Reserves and Parks are being established, where lighting restrictions preserve the night's integrity. In Indiana, where the night once stretched endlessly overhead, there is a growing recognition of the need to dim the lights.

Field Notes: Shooting in Salt Spray

Coastal astrophotography will ruin your gear if you get lazy. The salt in the air at places like Ka’ena Point settles on the front element of your lens and creates a hazy, soft-focus nightmare. Wipe your lens with a fresh microfiber cloth between every single long exposure. Keep your backup batteries in your pack until you need them.

A Brighter Path Forward

Flagstaff, Arizona, did not wait for an ecological crisis. In 1958, the astronomers at Lowell Observatory needed absolute darkness to peer into deep space, and the city simply agreed to protect it. They shielded their streetlights. They forced the beams down into the asphalt. They stripped out the blinding blue glare in favor of heavy, amber-hued LEDs.

That ongoing commitment earned Flagstaff the title of the world's first International Dark Sky City. It stands as undeniable proof of concept. A modern, expanding city can keep its streets safe and still let the Milky Way burn overhead.

The fix is entirely within our reach. We do not need a miraculous technological breakthrough to see the stars again. We just need to make deliberate physical choices.

Unscrew the harsh white floodlight on your porch. Replace it with a warm, shielded bulb. Put the security lights on a motion sensor. Let the dark exist undisturbed until someone actually needs to step into it. Support dark sky zoning in your county. Urban progress does not mandate erasing the natural world.

The cosmos is still up there, waiting for us to turn down the glare. Go find it. Pack a red-lens headlamp, drive out past the urban hum, cut your engine, and stand in the cold air. Let your eyes adjust to the black. Protecting the night sky is a fight to remember our actual place in the universe.

Keep Exploring: If you want to experience true, heavy darkness close to home, check out my guide to Hemlock Cliffs: Indiana’s Hidden Rainforest. If you are looking to capture these skies yourself, read through my raw, unedited failures and technical fixes in Beginners Mind: What I Learned from My Worst Photos.

Sources

Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting. Catherine Rich & Travis Longcore (eds). 2006. Island Press. Pages 281-304.

Hallmann, C. A., Sorg, M., Jongejans, E., Siepel, H., Hofland, N., Schwan, H., ... & de Kroon, H. (2017). More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLOS ONE, 12(10), e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish and Wildlife. "Northern Long-Eared Bat and Other Forest Bats in Indiana." in.gov, https://www.in.gov/dnr/fish-and-wildlife/files/fo-Northern_LE_and_other_forest_bats.pdf. Accessed 7 June 2024.

"The shocking environmental impact of treating wastewater with ‘forever chemicals’." University of Sussex, 24 May 2023, https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/60568. Accessed 7 June 2024.