From mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu Wed Jun 4 04:51:03 2003 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.133]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW03.04/8.12.1+UW03.02) with ESMTP id h54Bp21M059564 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 04:51:02 -0700 Received: from KIWI (kiwi.lemoyne.edu [192.231.122.6]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW03.04/8.12.1+UW03.02) with ESMTP id h54Bp1kB007381 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 04:51:01 -0700 Received: from mail.lemoyne.edu ([192.168.250.188]) by KIWI; Wed, 04 Jun 2003 07:50:23 -0400 Message-ID: <3EDDDCD9.D852B6E5@mail.lemoyne.edu> Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 07:49:45 -0400 From: "John M. McMahon" Reply-To: mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: CLASSICS@U.WASHINGTON.EDU Subject: The Nile by night Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Uwash-Spam: Gauge=IIIIIII, Probability=7%, Report="SPAM_PHRASE_00_01, X_ACCEPT_LANG, __EVITE_CTYPE, __HAS_X_MAILER" Long-suffering Classics-listers will bear with me on this one, but .... >From NASA's "Picture of the Day" (or night): "The Valley of the Kings: Part 2" Excerpt: "The sun still sets over the Nile, but the nights aren't as dark as they used to be. On April 11, 2003, ISS science officer Don Pettit used his 'barn door tracker' [link embedded] to capture this nighttime photo of the river's Great Bend region, where the Valley of the Kings is located. The Nile is aglow with modern lights: cities such as Luxor and Qena, for example, are bright and striking. Well-lit roads, like the one from Luxor to airport (which appears as a bright dot) criss-cross the image. The sites of old mortuary temples are more likely to make you squint than to contemplate. Fortunately, the Valley of the Kings itself remains dark. It's sheltered from ambient light pollution by distance and steep hillsides. In that spot, invisible to astronauts at night, the ancient dark remains."* Full text: http://science.nasa.gov/ppod/y2003/03jun_votk2.htm *True enough, I suppose, at ground level in the Valley itself -- and if you don't look above the horizontal; but the view of the skies to the N, W, and S must be awfully washed out from all that uplighting you can see along the river. IMHO, we are seeing (!) in a matter of just a few decades not just the degradation of the nocturnal environment all around us even in the most remote and rural locations to which ordinary folks could conceivable travel ... but -- much more significantly -- an authentic sea change in humans' intellectual appreciation of and their cultural relationship to the natural conditions that have for eons existed after sunset. What is really sad is that the solution is so simple: stellae sursum ... lumina deorsum. John McMahon LMC My lp page: http://webserver.lemoyne.edu/~mcmahon/lp.html .