The New Yorker on light pollution 
One of the darkest night skies I've experienced was in the South Australian outback. The ground is literally pitch black, but the sky is breathtakingly illuminated and you can see the Milky Way plainly. "In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen?currentPage=all
One of the darkest night skies I've experienced was in the South Australian outback. The ground is literally pitch black, but the sky is breathtakingly illuminated and you can see the Milky Way plainly. "In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen?currentPage=all
