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. 

Fear of the dark is one of the original human anxieties, which we have paradoxically turned into our strength. Since prehistoric times, the fear has pushed us to remove darkness at all costs. There were dangers lurking in the dark. It exposed our incapability—human eyes don’t cope well in darkness, so most of our activities happened in the bright part of day. At first with fire and later with electricity, we destroyed the most primeval sources of blackness and darkness. Light has become almost synonymous with the presence of humans: wherever there are humans, there is also light. Huge quantities of it. It oozes from streetlamps and uncovered windows; it splashes in colorful waves from large-scale advertisements. It is emitted by diodes and car controls that signal a myriad of different things. In Europe and in many parts of the US, we are