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It's Okay to Be Smart: Why the Stars Are Disappearing

10 minutes 26 seconds

Now Playing As: Captioned (English) (change)

It never gets dark anymore. Light pollution is not only making it more difficult to see the night sky, but it's also affecting human health. For the past century and a half, since the dawn of electric light, humans have been losing their connection to the night. In this episode, host Joe Hanson travels to McDonald Observatory in Texas, one of the darkest places in North America, to learn what people are doing in order to preserve dark skies. Part of the "It's Okay to Be Smart" series.

Media Details

Runtime: 10 minutes 26 seconds

Topic: Science
Subtopic: Astronomy, Space Sciences
Grade/Interest Level: 10 - 12
Standards:

Release Year: 2019
Producer/Distributor: PBS Digital Studios
Series: It's Okay to Be Smart
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Seven different butterflies, where four are placed at the corners facing the butterfly at the center and two at either side of the central butterfly.

Different math equations and graphs are drawn, with a butterfly as the backdrop.

An animal with the body of a lion, an extra goat head on its back, and a snake instead of a tail. Caption: Chimera.

A star filled night sky. Caption: P B S.

Sunlight is shining through in a forest with large number of trees.

Eggs of Screech owl, Turkey vulture, Audubon's Caracara, Kingfisher, Common Murree, Yellow Billed. Caption: Stoddard Et Al. Science 20 17.

A view of Moon in the dark sky. Caption: Maria, Latin for seas, and Sea of Tranquility, Mare Tranquillitatis.

Two different types of bacteria are seen all over a human outline. Caption: 37.2 trillion and 39 trillion.

Collage with black and white illustration of a twelfth century Chinese man holding out a scrap of paper. A red lantern on a pole overhead. Red prohibited symbol covers image of 2 gold bars.

The sample particles enter the mass spectrometer, which is accelerated, and then separated according to their individual mass of the particles by a magnet.