It’s obvious to anyone with eyeballs that there ain’t no damn stars in the city, while there are about a gazillion and one out in the countryside. But what do the various gradations of light pollution actually look like? Sriram Murali pointed his camera to the night sky to show you the progression of light pollution and when it starts screwing us from seeing stars.
Using the Bortle scale to measure light pollution (where Class 8 is a bad city sky and Class 1 is the darkest sky), Murali shows us what the sky looks like in a city like San Jose (that’s a Class 8) and compares it to each level all the way down to Death Valley (a Class 1).
It’s really neat to be able to see so many different levels of light pollution.
Wow, Class 8 is terrible:
Still gross Class 6:
Okay, Class 4, I see you:
Damn, Class 1:
And the entire video, which is much more awesome than just pictures: