Musings from a Dark Sky Sanctuary

What does it mean to be afraid of the dark?

We can still see the Milky Way here, can you?

On the Isle of Rum, the night sky is almost untouched by artificial light.

As an international Dark Sky Sanctuary for a whole year, we just celebrated with our first dark sky festival.

The skies here can be impossibly clear.

It really hammers home our miniscule place in the infinite universe, not just in space but in time too. The massive Andromeda galaxy, which we can see on a clear night, is 2.5 million light years away - the light we can see left 2.5 million years ago.

Andromeda appears as a purple smudge and is the most distant object we can see with the naked eye - you can find it by locating Schedar, the brightest star in the constellation of Cassiopeia which points directly at it. I love the names too, they are so evocative, full of mystery and storytelling. This is one of the reasons I love astronomy; I often wonder what it must have been like to look up at the night sky long ago, before we knew what we know now. Wondering what these little points of light were, why did some of them twinkle and look different colours, what did it all mean?

Getting to grips with the basics of stargazing can be awe inspiring, addictive and for me helps me to get to grips with my own life – in the overall scheme of things, I am so utterly insignificant that I feel liberated, obligated to just do my thing, regardless. This kind of irrelevance has the potential to destroy ego and reduce the constant pressure to perform, it can also make conflict feel, not meaningless but, sad to observe. If, in our world dominated by performance and conflict, we reflected more on the vastness of everything, would it be more peaceful?

Or would this run the risk of becoming nihilistic - what does responsibility mean if we are all cosmic dust?

I can see how this could have the opposite effect and become overwhelming - the idea of insignificance can be catastrophic for mental health and in a society where our anxieties fill every possible crevice, this could an unpleasant place to sit.

The skies were cloudy on Saturday night, and in place of stargazing outside, we went into the mobile planetarium for a guided tour of the night sky. The mobile planetarium is a big dome tent which projects a 180-degree image onto the walls of the dome. It’s best to lie down to get the full experience and to prevent you feeling a bit dizzy as the sky whizzes by.

Technology reduced the universe to a whistle-stop tour of distant moons and galaxies - the cosmos projected onto fabric while the real sky hid behind cloud.

We zoomed out to the edge of the observable universe, a place so distant, it looked sparsely populated - and yet the universe is filled with more stars than there are grains of sand on planet Earth.

I loved a retelling of the story of Orion the hunter and how he came to be in the night sky. Tales like this are what make the dark sky festival light up for me - the opportunity to tell stories about the darkness, these tiny specks of light, imagining shapes and creating narratives about them. Of the unknown so far away and so different from our everyday lives.

It took over three years for us to achieve our dark sky sanctuary status. There were reams of reporting to do. To meet the criteria of the International Dark Sky Association we carried out monthly measurements of the darkness/ brightness of the sky, it had to be consistently over a certain threshold, this was both in the village and out across the island. We are fortunate that we have one settlement in one location. The rest of the island is uninhabited by humans and has no artificial lighting to blight the unadulterated darkness. Being on the edge of Europe also means Rum is distant enough from heavy light pollution to make becoming a dark sky sanctuary a possibility.

We can protect our starlit skies here.

A cursory glance at a global map of light pollution illustrates how, over time, we have unintentionally engineered the night sky out of view.

It hasn’t changed; we have.

The invention of artificial light makes us safer, makes life easier and more comfortable and yet, slowly we are erasing our oldest compass and the ability for our children to see the Milky Way.

On Rum we have a management plan for our community and three partner organisations, all committed to keeping nighttime lighting to a minimum. Where outside lighting is needed, we use downlights, which help illuminate but don’t affect the darkness levels. We rely on a commitment from island residents to close curtains and blinds; it’s a two-way street; the dark sky sanctuary status is another means of attracting visitors to the island - for a different kind of off-season tourism, and that benefits us all.

You’ll notice a subtle paradox here – more visitors could mean more light, travel, infrastructure, so how do we promote the darkness and protect it at the same time? Here on Rum, we have limited accommodation and the ferry has limited capacity, so we are not going to be overwhelmed with visitors, and we are a niche location as it is. The management plan I mentioned above is a fluid document; we have ongoing standards to meet otherwise we run the risk of losing our hard-won status.

But the dark is more than this, the starlit skies are a fading heritage. With more nighttime lighting across the globe, we are losing this heritage before our very eyes, the very vista that hasn’t changed for thousands of years is slowly disappearing.

We look up and see the same thing as our cave dwelling ancestors did.

Interpreting what it all meant has inspired art, literature, music, science, navigation, religion… not much of our culture isn’t touched or hasn’t been shaped by the ideas that have come to us as we look up and imagine, guess and extrapolate. It is important to preserve the ability to see the sky like this, to foster curiosity and imagine what is going on. What happens to our culture if the sky that helped shape it, is rubbed from view and, this is something I feel keenly, does losing the darkness change the nature of our imagination? Instead of looking up at the night sky and having no idea what those pinpricks of light are and making up stories about them, I understand what they are and there is always space for new stories.

My scientific understanding hasn’t killed my wonder; it has reshaped it into something different, more focussed.

And yet the dark is still more than this too.

We are accustomed to lit environments pretty much all the time and darkness is connoted with fear and the unknown. Has the dark become the enemy and light, a societal comfort blanket?

On places like Rum, we can lean into the darkness and scrutinise our relationship with it, trying to unpick our fears of the unknown. Here,

 in the absence of constant light, the dark begins to feel less like a threat and more like perspective.

The darkness forces stillness, stillness forces reflection.

Sometimes I sit and watch the sky long enough to see the constellations drift slowly westward. Only after a few minutes or longer do I remember that the sky is not moving at all – it’s just us. The Earth turning quietly beneath our feet.

If we lose the night sky, what else do we lose that we haven’t named yet?