Light Pollution
It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.
It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.
This comic shows how light pollution in cities affects what you can see from the night sky. The first three panels show realistic examples of what you could see from the sky inside a large city, in the suburbs and far away from light pollution. These panels roughly correlate on the Bortle Scale to 8-9 (city), 5-6 (suburbs) and 2-3 (remote area).
The last panel contrasts these for comedic effect with fake things that are not actually present in the night sky.[citation needed] The "Ships of the Sky King" may be a reference to an elven legend in J. R. R. Tolkien's works, in which several elven ships sail tangentially off the planet of Middle Earth and into the sky. This story was previously mentioned in 1255: Columbus. "Crystal spheres" is an ancient theory about the heavens and what it was that held up the stars, before it was commonly accepted that space could be made of hard vacuum and celestial bodies held there by laws of inertia and gravity and vast distances. The spheres are nested inside each other concentrically. Randall proposes they are held by latticework like that which supports the Eiffel Tower, and that the lattice structure could be seen long ago when the sky was much darker. It is also a possible reference to the science fiction short-story "The Crystal Spheres" by David Brin, where the solar system is surrounded by hard crystal spheres that have to be broken before leaving as an explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Furthermore, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, the solar system is also enclosed in a massive crystal sphere, with other solar systems in similar solar systems, separated by "the flow".
Although all crystals do have a crystal lattice, as in the meaning 3 of the word "crystal" in Merriam-Webster (a body that [...] has a regularly repeating internal arrangement of its atoms and often external plane faces), these lattices are sub-microscopic and would be invisible in the sky. Additionally, crystal structure was not yet known at the time that the celestial spheres theory was popular. Crystal Spheres were also mentioned in 1189: Voyager 1.
In consensus reality, the sky does contain many invisible objects that can observe us and/or provide major structures of our society, such as satellites, nearcraft, and drones, but these are usually invisible due to size and distance more than brightness.
The title text starts off sounding like a legitimate statement about light pollution. It is common to remark that the vast majority of people never see things in the night sky that were commonly seen by our ancestors every night prior to industrialization, such as the Milky Way or now-obscure phenomena such as Zodiacal light, Airglow or Gegenschein. The title text then further adds to the humor of the last panel by describing non-existent features, which could be references to H. P. Lovecraft as he often refers to beasts the possible size that “The Destroyer of Sagittarius” would have to be (Sagittarius is one of the constellations of the zodiac and Sagittarius A* a black hole at the center of the Milky Way inside of that constellation.). He also often speaks of insanity and color, connecting the two.
Light pollution was later mentioned in 2274: Stargazing 3.