LA Residents Spooked During a Power Cut

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Nice bit of trivia from a short and positive article about tackling light pollution.

"When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time."

[Dave Lloyd]

That is so sad. In his novel Lucifers Hammer, Larry Niven advocated taking the residents of L.A out to the Sierra Nevada in small groups and just let them see the stars. Once they saw they would want their sky back. Having been out to the Sierras I know what he meant.

[callisto]

Nice bit of trivia from a short and positive article about tackling light pollution.

"When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time."

OMG....It was in 1994 and I was there visiting family , it was fantastic (to me) looking at the sky from my inlaws balcony.

They do seem to panic over there for the weirdest things. I remember driving a rental car on the freeway and the heavens opened and it rained very hard, all of a sudden, motorists just slowed down to a stop, I started shouting at them, the mother-in-law turned to me and said "they do it all the time here when it rain's because they are not used to it"

[Dave Lloyd]

Hmm, that's a bit sad too.

[Carbon]

I remember that one pre-dawn morning in January of 1994 when the massive Northridge Earthquake took out all power here in the LA region.   The skies over head were beautiful.   Today, I need to drive 90 miles out to see the Milky Way.  I really need to take my grand kids out camping one day as they've never seen dark skies.

I still live here in LA, and we also panic over rain.  Speaking of which, the last measurable rain fall we had, if I recall, was several months ago in Spring.  It's really bad here with the drought.

I need to get out of SoCal and move to a higher elevation regions of Arizona or New Mexico, seriously.

[Cath]

A space fairing nation that panics when they see stars 

Their has to be message in that somewhere lol

[Knight of Clear Skies]

I guess many American living in cities simply aren't used to seeing more than the 50 that appear on their flag at any one time.

It's a similar story over here, most people living in this country have never seen the Milky Way. I was talking to someone a couple days ago who didn't realise the Milky Way runs all the way across the sky, and this was someone interested in the subject enough to buy some binoculars for observing. For that matter I can't remember when I first saw it, growing up in a town, but I don't think it was until I was in my teens.

[starman1969]

Here is a video of Terence Dickinson, who wrote about this event in his book Nightwatch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSimA7kpGJ8