A few minutes after the sun retreated behind the Olympic Mountains, we spotted our first satellite. It moved across the sky with an eerie persistence, like a car on cruise control.
“That’s low Earth orbit. That’s pretty standard speed,” Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington and my stargazing guide for the night, tells me.
The primal human experience of gazing into a dark, unblemished night sky — something we’ve been doing for at least 32,000 years, since our ancestors carved Orion onto a mammoth tusk — is vanishing. That nocturnal vista is becoming a dense, industrial field of orbiting debris.
“I tell people, go to a dark site and see the sky now, while it’s like this,” Rawls says, gesturing to the constellations above us. She lets out a laugh. “It’s like, oh my God, what are we doing?”
The scale is hard to
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