Darkness falls across the land, midnight hour is close at hand...

• Prize
• Photographer
  Jesper Anhede, Sweden

Darkness falls across the land, midnight hour is close at hand... On
assignment for at J-L Ranch vacation homes.

In most situations, light helps us see. But when it comes to looking at
the night sky, light is actually a kind of pollution. It hampers our view
of some of life’s most spectacular sights: stars, planets, and even
galaxies.

Normally, about 2,500 individual stars are visible to the human eye
without using any special equipment. But because of light pollution,
you actually see just 200 to 300 from today’s suburbs, and fewer than
a dozen from a typical city.

Only one in three Americans can see the galaxy, the dazzling Milky
Way, with the naked eye. Those people live far away from the lights of
big cities, office buildings, and shopping malls.

In Centennial Valley there is no light pollution around. Here is the
Smith House under the starry sky and Milky Way saying hi.