Why is it when in movies or pictures taken, the stars are bright and they’re everywhere visible but when I look at the sky from places like Dubai or Turkey, there are no stars. Isn’t stars abundant everywhere in space and should be visible around the world with clear skies?
In: Physics
Light that comes from the ground (buildings, street lights, cars, etc.) makes it harder to see stars. This is called “light pollution”.
It’s the same as how you have to turn your phone brightness up during the day to see the screen better, but at night you can use make the screen darker.
All the light from the ground make the dark sky a bit brighter, but you can’t turn up the brightness of the stars. So, only the brightest stars can still shine through.
If you drive away from Dubai into the empty desert, you will see many more stars even though it’s the same sky they see in the city.
Imagine you’re trying to see a glow in the dark sticker but your brother is shining a flashlight at your face. Because the light from the flashlight is so much stronger, it drowns out the light from the glow in the dark sticker.
Of course, lights from stars are much stronger at generation. Because they are so far away, they are less intense and appear much weaker by the time they get to our sky and compete with other lights like city lights.
Light pollution is an enormous problem. The stars are far away and have to shine through the atmosphere. So it’s not that the star are gone, but they’re drowned out by all the light that inhabited areas give off.
Even hundreds of kilometers away, a city’s lights can make it harder to see the stars above you.
Latest Answers