Documenting Darkness
Writing Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night
“We didn’t just lose the stars—we lost the stories they carried. This is a guide for finding them again.”
This book began in the absence of something.
Not silence, exactly. Not even darkness. But the awareness that both were slipping away. Most of us don’t live with real night anymore, we live in its imitation. I wrote this book to track what’s been lost, and what still exists at the edge of the skyglow.
My life as a photographer taught me to love the night, and the hours just before morning. I’ve always worked best before the world wakes up, when the streets are still empty and the air feels thinner. That’s when most of this book was written: over the past seven months, in the quiet hours between midnight and dawn. I’d sit by the window of my office and look out over the dark silhouette of the hills, watching the halos of artificial light from the cities to the east, south, and west. The dark was never complete. But it was enough to remember what night once was—and imagine what it still could be.
We were never meant to live without the night. We were meant to remember it.
What We’ve Lost in the Glow
For most of human history, night shaped everything. It told us when to rest, when to move, where to gather, and what stories to tell. Darkness wasn’t just the absence of light. It was rhythm. It was ritual. It was survival. But in the span of a single lifetime, we’ve drowned that world in streetlights, security lamps, and LED glare.
The Milky Way—the same sky our ancestors used to cross oceans and deserts—is now invisible to over 80 percent of people in the United States. That’s not poetic exaggeration. That’s measurable. And it’s a problem.
We haven’t just lit the sky. We’ve buried it.
When I first started photographing the night sky, I wanted to make art. I wanted to show people what the world looked like while they slept. The quiet roads, the stars over empty cornfields fields, the way light bends and disappears where the city’s halo ends. But the more I photographed, the more I realized I was documenting something that was fading. What started as long exposures turned into something more, an attempt to hold on. A kind of witness statement before the view was gone.
We’ve filled our orbit with junk and noise, debris, drones, stealth aircraft, blinking swarms of satellites. We’ve turned the night sky into a traffic jam of human ambition. And still, in all that noise, there are moments of wonder. There are still things up there we don’t fully understand.
This book doesn’t have all the answers. But it does have stories, histories, and signals worth noticing. It’s here to remind you that the sky is still speaking, quieter than before, maybe, but not silent. We only have to be willing to notice it.
The Book I Needed to Write
Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is part history, part cultural reckoning, part personal map. It traces how darkness has shaped human behavior, belief, and survival, from ancient skies to modern surveillance. Inside, you’ll find stories of Cold War radar towers hidden in the woods, wartime blackouts that changed how cities breathed after sunset, and forgotten myths written into the stars. It also looks closer to the ground, at the army of service workers who reset the world each night while the rest of us sleep, dispatchers, nurses, cleaners, overnight drivers, and caretakers who prepare the day before it begins. We don’t often see them. But we depend on them more than we know.
Each chapter explores a different facet of night: what we’ve lost to artificial light, what still survives, and what might be recovered if we learn to look again.
The writing came slowly. It followed no routine, just the rhythm of whatever time was left at the end of the day. Most of it happened between 3:30 and 6 a.m. Not out of ritual or aesthetic, just because that was when the house was quiet, the inbox was still, and the voice of the book felt clearest. The questions were always there. I just needed silence to hear them.
And maybe that’s what this book really is: an act of listening. Not just to silence, but to what silence reveals. To memory, both personal and collective. To the warnings, the wonders, and the instructions that darkness has always carried.
How the Book Is Structured
The book unfolds like the night itself—from fear to wonder, from concealment to clarity. It’s divided into four thematic parts that track humanity’s evolving relationship with darkness.
Part I: Darkness and Defense
We begin where night begins: in fear. This section traces the primal roots of our fear of the dark and how that fear became institutionalized. From childhood monsters to blackout drills and the militarization of light, it examines how night became something to manage, contain, and survive. Here, darkness is not metaphor. It is policy, strategy, and sometimes salvation.
Highlights include:
The psychology of inherited fear and childhood myth
World War II blackout culture in Europe and the U.S.
The Cold War shift from concealment to surveillance
Part II: Sky and Spectacle
Once we learned to survive the dark, we looked up. This section explores our long and complicated relationship with the night sky, as calendar, compass, oracle, and mirror. It tracks how we interpreted celestial events, how we feared them, and how we came to understand (and clutter) the cosmos.
Highlights include:
Halley’s Comet through history, from omens to orbits
The Hudson Valley UFO wave and Cold War aerospace secrecy
Indigenous skywatching traditions and the cultural meaning of aurorae
Part III: Silence and Survival
This section turns to the human stories that unfold in the shadows. Night as refuge, as risk, as workplace. It explores how people have used darkness for protection, resistance, and resilience. From Underground Railroad routes to bootlegging trails, from fire lookout towers to factory floors, this is a chronicle of labor, escape, and endurance after sundown.
Highlights include:
Prohibition-era smugglers and the Catskill night highway
Fire towers, lighthouses, and remote night watchposts
The physical and psychological toll of overnight work
Part IV: Light, Lost and Found
Finally, we confront the modern condition: our slow and steady erasure of night. This section explores what we lose when darkness disappears. From ecological disruption and circadian disorientation to the fading of cultural memory and myth, it asks what it means to preserve something we can’t always see—and why it still matters.
Highlights include:
The measurable consequences of artificial light
Encounters with dark skies and their emotional impact
Why protecting the night matters—for science, for sleep, and for the rhythm of life itself
Why I Advocate for the Dark
The night sky is more than a backdrop. It’s a system we once relied on, for health, for sleep, for movement and survival. Entire species migrate by moonlight or hatch by starlight. Our own internal clocks are synced to rhythms we’ve barely begun to understand. When we flood the dark with light, we disrupt more than ecosystems. We lose our bearings.
Because when we erase the dark, we erase part of our origin story.
If you’ve ever stood under a truly dark sky, no glow on the horizon, no hum of artificial light, then you know the feeling. The Milky Way stretching above like a seam in the universe. The quiet recalibration that happens within you. The sense that you’re part of something older and larger than yourself.
That feeling isn’t just beautiful. It’s how we’ve always understood where we are. It’s orientation. And it’s vanishing.
Why This Matters Now
We’ve replaced the stars with things we launched. We’ve traded aurorae for optical clutter. We stare at blinking lights and call it progress, but forget what it means to stand still and let the night arrive. The dark isn’t empty. It’s full. And the more we light it up, the more we flatten what it used to mean.
This book is my way of asking you to notice. To remember. To feel the depth of a sky that once gave us direction, wonder, and a sense of where we belong.
One Final Note
I wrote this book because I believe darkness is worth defending. Not just for astronomers or photographers, but for anyone who’s ever felt the quiet shift that comes after sunset. For the kids growing up under skies where the Milky Way no longer appears. For the night workers who keep the world moving while the rest of us sleep.
More than 80 percent of people in the U.S. can’t see the Milky Way from where they live. That’s not just a loss for stargazers—it’s a loss of orientation, of connection, of memory.
Lately, I’ve noticed something. People are starting to look up again—not always in person, but on their screens. Social media lights up every time there’s a major sky event. A comet. An eclipse. A burst of northern lights reaching farther south than expected. These moments spark questions. They remind us that the sky is still active, still changing, still bigger than we are.
The sky is always a show. The question is whether we’ll still be able to see it.
That’s why I wrote this book. For anyone who’s starting to notice, and wants to hold onto what’s left.
You can learn more at: www.fieldguidetothenight.com
Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions, with free Prime shipping.
Book Details
Publisher: Restoration Obscura Press
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Language: English
Print Length: 368 pages
ISBN: 979-8218702731
Availability: Amazon Prime eligible | Available worldwide on Amazon
Price: Paperback: $14.99 | Kindle: $9.99
About Restoration Obscura
Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another shot at being seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the forgotten chapters—the ones buried in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.
The name nods to the camera obscura, an early photographic device that captured light in a darkened chamber. Restoration Obscura flips that idea, pulling stories out of darkness and casting light on what history left behind.
This project uncovers what textbooks miss: Cold War secrets, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, lost towns, and the people tied to them. Each episode, article, or image rebuilds a fractured past and brings it back into focus, one story at a time.
If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever felt something standing at the edge of a ruin or holding an old photograph, this space is for you.
Subscribe to support independent, reader-funded storytelling: www.restorationobscura.com
🎧 The Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast is streaming now on all major streaming platforms.
Every photo has a story. And every story connects us.
© 2025 John Bulmer Media & Restoration Obscura. All rights reserved. Educational use only.
Sounds fantastic! Just ordered!