Blinded by the light: how skyglow pollution is separating us from the stars

The Milky Way over Maleny golf club, with skyglow from the Sunshine Coast on the horizon. Light pollution is slowly curtaining the view of the night sky. Photograph: Ken Wishaw

On a clear dark Queensland night in 1997, Brendan Downs was staring up into the cosmos alongside a band of other amateur astronomers. He trained his telescope on a galaxy called NGC 6769, floating more than 169m light years away, and took a picture.

“I had a reference image that I had in a book at the time, and I visually compared the object on the screen to the object in the book,” he says. “I counted the number of stars I was looking at.”