You see the Southern Cross everywhere lately — on T-shirts, tattoos and train stations. It's a pity then that pretty soon we won't be able to see it in the actual sky.
Who did not, as a child, lie on their backs and wonder at the night sky? Searching for the familiar shape of the Saucepan or the red glow of Mars, gasping at the heart-skipping sight of a shooting star and marvelling at what Byron called, 'the poetry of heaven'. Today when I look out from our inner-city backyard, I am lucky if I can count 50 individual stars. And most of those are probably aeroplanes.
When was it decided that the replacement of our night sky with a near-blank canvas was acceptable? Bit by bit, every year, a few more of Shakespeare's 'blessed candles of the night' are extinguished by the ever-brightening domes that hang over our cities.
According to the International Astronomical Union, two billion people — almost 30 per cent of the world's population — cannot see the Milky Way. And as the view is obscured, so too is that powerful reminder that we are part of something much grander, an insignificant dot in a vast and expanding universe.
Our love of all things light and bright has killed our access to true darkness. From households that love the 'security' of a well-lit backyard to advertising execs who think we really need neon reminders of our banking options at 4.00 am, a large proportion of lighting is probably unnecessary.
Even lighting regarded as essential, such as street lights and flood lighting on public buildings, can be shamefully inefficient, with an estimated 30 per cent of the glow being pointlessly directed skyward where it lights up water and dust particles, contributing to that sickly orange halo.
Our desperate need for something like perpetual daylight can in part be attributed to a childlike fear of the bogeyman and the unfounded assumption that more and brighter lighting will make us safe.
Certainly public lighting has a positive effect on people's sense of security but studies of its actual effect on crime rates are inconclusive at best. In fact in a 2008 experiment in Essex where all street lights were turned out between midnight and 5.30 am, a marked decrease in crime was observed. A similar trend has also been measured in cities that have experienced long-term power outages.
Earlier this month there was a