The night I finally saw the sky, by Imogen Farrant

An original contemporary blog.

I have lived in cities all my life, so I thought I knew what the night sky looked like. It was orange at the edges, a dull grey-brown in the middle, and on a good night it had about twenty stars in it, one of which usually turned out to be an aeroplane. I was wrong. Last weekend, in a field in the hills of mid Wales, I saw the sky for the first time.

I had booked a place on a stargazing night run by the Elenydd Dark Sky Trust, a small charity that works with farmers and villages to keep the area’s night as black as possible. That means shielded streetlights, warm bulbs that point downwards, and a lot of polite conversations with people about their security lights. Their reward is a sky so dark that the area is said to be one of the best places in Europe to see the stars.

Our guide, a former astrophysicist called Ruairi Entwistle, made us leave our phones in the car. ‘Your eyes need thirty minutes to adjust,’ he said. ‘One glance at a screen and you start again.’ So we stood in the dark field, a dozen strangers, feeling slightly silly, waiting.

And then it happened, gradually and all at once. First a scattering of stars. Then hundreds. Then so many that the familiar shapes I had learned as a child, the Plough, Orion’s belt, simply drowned in them. Across the whole sky, from one hedge to the other, ran a pale, smoky river. I genuinely thought it was a cloud. It was the Milky Way: the edge-on view of our own galaxy, billions of suns so far away that their light merges into mist.

Someone behind me whispered, ‘Oh.’ That was all. Nobody else said anything for a long time.

I have tried, since, to describe what it felt like, and I keep failing. It was not exactly beautiful, although it was. It was closer to dizzying. Lying on a mat in the cold grass, I had the strange sensation that I was not looking up at all, but down, into something very deep.

Here is the part that shocked me. Ruairi told us that most people in Britain have never seen the Milky Way from where they live. Not because it has gone, but because our lights have drowned it out. For almost the whole of human history, every child who looked up at night saw what I saw last weekend. We have lost it in a couple of generations, and most of us have not even noticed.

Before we left, he pointed out a faint smudge near a bright star. ‘That’s the Andromeda galaxy,’ he said. ‘The light hitting your eye tonight set off two and a half million years ago.’ I looked at it for a long time. I thought about my street at home, with its streetlights glowing all night over empty pavements.

Back in the car, my phone screen felt like a searchlight. I drove home slowly, and when I got there I switched off the porch light. It is a small thing. But I want to see that river again, and I want my children to see it too.

A night under a truly dark sky is described as a rare and astonishing experience. How does the writer try to show this?

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