Celestial Music vs. Sickly Orange Barf Glow

The other day we watched this time lapse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk6_hdRtJOE in class.  I've been watching it many times over since then and it's simply incredible.  I love watching the meteors go against the stars, I love how I gain the fleeting feeling that the Earth is a sphere, I love watching the clouds look like water.  I love watching the trees blow in the wind and watching the stars rise and set and knowing that this will continue for a long, long time.  And I love how it makes me marvel at the incomprehensibility of the size of the universe.  I know many people are not comfortable with the idea of being insignificant in the universe.  But can you imagine if our actions actually did have an impact on the universe as a whole?  How would we manage the courage to do anything at all?  As T. S. Eliot would ask in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock",  "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"  I manage to find comfort in the fact that I can still help the people around me and make an impact in their lives, ideally a positive one, and in the fact that it is still possible to have an impact on a global scale, if you're lucky.  No, this is still not significant in the universe as a whole, but why shouldn't it be significant to us?

I sometimes feel guilty in my choice to go into science.  I know that without basic research we would not advance in technology and engineering and I know that complacency shouldn't be rewarded.  But sometimes I still feel like I should be doing something more practical, something that will help improve people's lives more directly.  Yet when I watch this time lapse, I feel a little better and I remember why I came to science in the first place.  How could I not wonder at our place in the universe after watching something like that?  How could I not be entranced and lured by science's beauty?  Seeing those images makes me want to understand nature so I can appreciate it better.  And I have not encountered anything better than science to accomplish that.  Maybe if we start to learn about the world around us, we will all appreciate it more and come to peace with our place in it.  I still haven't been able to completely shake the feeling that I should work on making other people's lives better, but I also know that science is a noble and worthwhile pursuit, one that I will not give up on very easily.

Not everything in the video was uplifting, though.  In the final time lapse in the video, it is hard not to focus on how much of the night sky is being taken over by light from the ground.  I was once walking under the orange clouds that are the Los Angles night sky and remembered a quote from The Simpsons.  In this particular episode, Lisa has become interested in astronomy and despairs at the fact that she can't see anything through her telescope due to light pollution.  She remarks that "nobody ever wrote a poem about sickly orange barf glow" and she'd rather see the stars.  I took that as a challenge and wrote a poem about the sickly orange barf glow of the L.A. sky.  (Well, it's actually more of a song.  You can sing it to the tune of the Winnie the Pooh Little Black Rain Cloud song, if you desire.)  Here are the lyrics:

I'm just sickly orange barf glow
Hanging over L.A.,
Taking your night sky away.
Everybody knows that smog clouds
Send acid rain down.
I'm just hovering around,
Over the ground,
Making astronomers frown.

So there's a poem about sickly orange barf glow.  But I'd still rather have stars.