At age 18, Paul Bogard had a life-changing vision. Stepping outside his youth hostel at the edge of the Sahara, in a remote town where nomadic tribes gathered to barter and trade, he saw “a storm of stars swirl[ing] around me”: the night sky as he had never seen it before. Even his family’s cabin in rural Minnesota didn’t have views like this, almost completely untainted by human light pollution. “I saw the sky that night in three dimensions,” he writes. “The sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call ‘structure,’ that sense of its twisting depths.”
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