Eighty percent of Americans, 60 percent of Europeans can't see Milky Way

(CNN)If you look up at the evening sky, there's a good chance you will not be able to see what your grandmother saw when she was a little girl.

That's because we're enshrouded in an artificial haze of light that is blocking the night sky, a phenomenon scientists call light pollution.
Scientists believe one-third of humanity cannot view the Milky Way — this includes 80% of Americans and 60% of Europeans because city lights are creating fogs of light pollution, according to a new study that published Friday in the journal of Science Advances.

Fans of starry skies take a dim view of disappearing dark
By John Ritter, USA TODAY  Updated 11/2/2007
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Stores in a new mall here found a way to get around one of the USA's toughest lighting ordinances. That's how Chris Luginbuhl sees it anyway.
The stores hung big round globes inside their front doors that shine bright white light outside on the sidewalk and beyond. Retailers think lights attract customers like moths, Luginbuhl says, even though these "glare bombs" actually make it harder to see.
They also waste light — and energy — shining it into the night sky, he says. The lights of most urban areas in the USA erase the Milky Way and many stars from nighttime views.
"People have become estranged from the night," Luginbuhl says. "We're trying to remind people that darkness is a natural condition, not something pathological that needs fixing."
Part of Luginbuhl's job as an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory here is to keep the night sky dark — or starry — and he has help. A movement to promote ways to keep the sky dark may still be small, but when a growing number of cities and towns study how to cut glaring lights and save energy costs, they look to this city of 58,000 south of the Grand Canyon as the model.

After Luginbuhl and John Grahame, co-founder of a local dark-sky coalition, complained about the mall lights, city officials got the developer to try getting the stores to change them.
"The vast majority of people grow up in a city and don't know what a dark sky looks like," says David Crawford, co-founder of the International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson. "I've never seen anybody who wasn't deeply impressed, their souls struck almost, by being out in a really dark place."
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-11-02-darksky-inside_N.htm