Sandhills Nights
Essay by Stephen R. Jones
Photography by Stephen R. Jones, Bob Rooney
Night comes to the Sandhills. Far from city lights, the setting sun gives way to brightly-colored stars set in an inky-black void.
There’s a popular wall map titled “The United States at Night” that shows the pattern of lights across the country as seen from a satellite. A half dozen “black holes,” large areas where no urban light penetrates the natural darkness, show up on the map. Five of these areas lie in the Great Basin. Just one lies east of the Rockies, clearly delineating the boundaries of the Nebraska Sandhills.
On rare occasions the sky shimmers with the aurora borealis…
…but on most nights the ground glows in the moonlight while stars swirl overhead.
