Big city folk, a question....

No, I'm not going to be mean about your city.

Long time ago I wrote about a foreign exchange student we hosted. She was from Chiba, which is a suburb of Tokyo in Japan. Her first night here she was in utter amazement.. "Stars"... she had never seen stars... you can't see stars in Tokyo because of light pollution... (or very very few stars).

I live in a very small country town... Fresno the closest big city some 35 miles to the NE of my home town. We have very good sky viewing but yes, the view to the NE is now quite light polluted making anything in the sky near the horizon in that direction almost impossible to see.. bummer because that's the prime direction to look for meteors.

But this weekend camping... at about 5,000', I was very depressed to see what clear skies SHOULD be like because my hometown used to have skies like that. My ranch has clear skies at only about 4,000'.

When I travel to LA, or SF... I don't go there to view the sky so I never really look up while there and I began wondering... like our foreign exchange student are the stars erased for those of you in the large cities? St. Louis?, or wherever you live?