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Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution

By (author) Sara B. Pritchard, Series edited by Paul S. Sutter, Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

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| book description |

Who owns the nightâ€”and what is lost as we flood it with light, worldwide?Darkness has become legibleâ€”and contested. Blending archival narrative with on-the-ground ethnography, Sara B. Pritchard traces how four fieldsâ€”astronomy, remote sensing, conservation science, and ecologyâ€”have investigated artificial light at night, turning a ubiquitous convenience into a category of harm. From observatories chasing ever-receding darkness to the satellite images that first rendered a nocturnal planet from space and recent â€œBlack Marbleâ€ maps, Pritchard shows how methods, instruments, and field sites shape what scientists can know about night and lightâ€”and what remains unseen. Across these encounters, night emerges not as a backdrop but as an environment in its own rightâ€”one transformed by rapidly expanding, brightening illumination in the Anthropocene. Transforming Night chronicles the ascent of â€œlight pollution,â€ as well as the new challenge of space-based brightness from satellite constellations, even as dark-sky advocates fight to preserve the starry firmament. Attentive to politics as much as photons, Pritchard brings environmental justice to the foreâ€”highlighting tensions among light poverty, forced illumination, and surveillance and calls for â€œbeneficial darkness.â€ She takes seriously Indigenous astronomersâ€™ critiques of dispossession and â€œastro-colonialism,â€ asking what it means to site world-class telescopes on sacred land. Sweeping from local parks to planetary vistas, Transforming Night reframes a familiar story of modern light as a history of changing nightsâ€”past, present, and possible. It will engage readers in environmental history and humanities, science and technology studies, and the sciences themselves, along with dark-sky activists and anyone drawn to the beauty and politics of the world after nightfall.