I live in the boonies [equally sic], about five miles outside of Dexter, MI.
When we built our house, I used to love sitting on the front porch and watching the sky. The first few summers you could see the Milky Way as this massive cloudy band running from horizon to horizon. But more and more people moved in, and after five years the 120 acres in our subdivision was full -- about 40 houses. Thanks to the local zoning board the minumum lot size in Dexter township is an acre, and many lots are much larger. But other subdivisions and houses continued to go up all around, and even with big lots it added more and more light to the rural sky. Today that night sky isn't as brilliant as it was when we moved in.
Dexter is a great place to live. It's quiet, it's semi-rural, but it's not the little farming community Ruth was born into. The other day someone called Dexter a suburb of Ann Arbor, and I couldn't argue. One reason is the gradual loss of that fantastic night sky.
We had a very clear night a few days back, and I walked out onto the front porch to look for the comet. The moon was pretty bright, but the sky was clear enough to be worth a shot at comet-watching. It stuck out like a sore thumb. It was almost directly between Polaris and the big dipper, and the tail was easily twice as long as the dipper. Easily. The head and the coma were both visible with the naked eye. And this is supposedly after the brightest nights were past, with competition from the moon, and I'd just stepped out of a bright house. It was great, but I could see the light pollution from glorious downtown Dexter.
Then the next day came the posting about driving out to the boonies of Chicago and barely seeing the tail while using binoculars.
So everything is relative. Dexter may be more crowded than it used to be, and there are a lot more silly lights on at night -- but it's never going to be Chicago, and thank goodness for that.
Original written March 30, 1996, rewritten April 27, 1996