The Night I First Saw the Milky Way

“Grandma, why are there so many stars here? It’s nothing like what I see from our apartment.”

“Cities have a lot of things blocking the stars. Have you ever really looked closely at the night sky, Seojun?”

“From our apartment window, I can barely see a few bright stars.”

“That’s called ‘light pollution.’ Streetlights, signs, and building lights keep leaking upward into the sky even at night, and they wash the whole sky in a faint glow. Once that happens, fainter starlight just gets buried in all that brightness and disappears.”

“So why can I see them so well here?”

“There are fewer lights out here, so the sky gets to stay as dark as it naturally is. That’s what lets even the faintest starlight reach your eyes.”

“Grandma, what’s that hazy river-looking thing over there?”

“That’s the Milky Way. It’s part of the galaxy we live in, seen edge-on from the side.”

“You can’t see that from the city?”

“Almost never. In cities with heavy light pollution, plenty of people have never seen the Milky Way in their whole lives.”

“So I hadn’t seen it either, this whole time.”

“You’re seeing it for the first time, right now.”

Seojun couldn’t take his eyes off that hazy river of light for a long, long time.

“Grandma, could I take a picture of this and show it in the city?”

“You could take a photo, but it’s not quite the same as seeing it with your own eyes like this. So make sure you keep what you saw tonight somewhere in your memory.”

“How do I do that?”

“Just like right now, staying still and looking up for a long time. That’s the best way there is.”