The train you’re taking to see your family is running late. What do you do?
a) Let down my braid, hoist up my skirt, and run to them as fast as I can.
b) No worries, they won’t start eating until I show up.
c) Kill time. Then there’s nothing left.
d) I don’t take a train to see my family—I walk through the woods!
Nothing is more beautiful at night than the sight of a coal-black sky uncontaminated by the lights of major metropolises. But when we look up, do we really see what we think we see? Here are all the dark secrets of the dimmest of hues.
The statement that the night sky is black sounds like a truism. “Of course,” we think, “what color would it be, since night is the absence of light, and the absence of light is blackness?” Yet first, we need to state that in most of Europe and large swaths of the United States—in fact, in much of the world—it is extremely difficult to verify the truth of such a claim. We live in a time when a generation of people is being born who may never experience the blackness of a night sky.
