“It all started when Gail Topping began losing the Milky Way.
For years, from her home in the hills above Ojai, she could see the gauzy, faint galaxy streaking across the sky, along with Orion, the Big Dipper and Pleiades.
I track the changing of summer and winter by the constellations, she said.
But as light from Ojai’s streets, stadiums and parking lots increased, the dark skies started getting lighter and the Milky Way started to fade.
I was losing something like a landscape, and I didn’t like it, she said. I held onto this idea that it had to stop. “