Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution

Who owns the night-and what is lost as we flood it with light, worldwide?Darkness has become legible-and contested. Blending archival narrative with on-the-ground ethnography, Sara B. Pritchard traces how four fields-astronomy, remote sensing, conservation science, and ecology-have investigated artificial light at night, turning a ubiquitous convenience into a category of harm. From observatories chasing ever-receding darkness to the satellite images that first rendered a nocturnal planet from space and recent "Black Marble" maps, Pritchard shows how methods, instruments, and field sites shape what scientists can know about night and light-and what remains unseen.

Across these encounters, night emerges not as a backdrop but as an environment in its own right-one transformed by rapidly expanding, brightening illumination in the Anthropocene. Transforming Night chronicles the ascent of "light pollution," as well as the new challenge of space-based brightness from satellite constellations, even as dark-sky advocates fight to preserve the starry firmament. Attentive to politics as much as photons, Pritchard brings environmental justice to the fore-highlighting tensions among light poverty, forced illumination, and surveillance and calls for "beneficial darkness." She takes seriously Indigenous astronomers' critiques of dispossession and "astro-colonialism," asking what it means to site world-class telescopes on sacred land.

Sweeping from local parks to planetary vistas, Transforming Night reframes a familiar story of modern light as a history of changing nights-past, present, and possible. It will engage readers in environmental history and humanities, science and technology studies, and the sciences themselves, along with dark-sky activists and anyone drawn to the beauty and politics of the world after nightfall.