When Mia first heard that her school was running an astronomy camp at a remote sheep station, she almost did not put her name forward. The idea of spending three nights far from town, without her phone signal or her favourite shows, seemed more like a punishment than a treat. Her older brother, however, told her that the outback skies were unlike anything she had ever seen, and so, mostly out of curiosity, she signed the form. The station sat hundreds of kilometres from the nearest city, in a part of the country that the camp organisers proudly called a dark-sky reserve. Mia had never heard the term before. Her teacher, Mr Okafor, explained that in such places the glow of streetlights, billboards and houses was deliberately kept to a minimum. Without that artificial brightness washing out the heavens, the stars could be seen in extraordinary numbers. He called the problem of unwanted city glow "light pollution", and he said it was one of the few kinds of pollution that could be reversed in a single evening simply by switching off a lamp. On the first night, Mia stepped outside after dinner and stopped in her tracks. The sky was not the dull, half-empty dome she knew from home. It was crowded, almost overwhelming, with countless points of light scattered from one horizon to the other. A pale, milky band arched overhead, and Mr Okafor told the group that they were looking straight into the heart of their own galaxy. Mia had read about the Milky Way in books, but seeing it sprawl above her was something else entirely. Over the next two nights, the students learned to recognise patterns among the chaos. Mr Okafor handed out red torches, explaining that red light did not spoil their night vision the way ordinary white light did. By its dim glow they traced the shape of the Southern Cross, a small but famous group of stars that generations of travellers had used to find their bearings. They watched a satellite drift silently across the sky and cheered when a meteor flared and vanished in less than a heartbeat. What surprised Mia most was the silence. There were no engines, no hum of traffic, only the occasional bleat of a distant sheep and the soft conversation of her classmates. In that stillness she found it easy to imagine the astronomers of long ago, charting the same stars without any of the instruments she took for granted. By the final morning, Mia understood why her brother had been so insistent. She had arrived expecting boredom and had instead discovered a sky she had never properly noticed, hidden all her life behind the everyday glow of the city. On the long drive home she scribbled a promise in her notebook: she would talk to her local council about dimming the unnecessary lights near her street, so that one day, even in town, a few more of those distant stars might shine through. The darkest skies, she had learned, were also the richest, and they were worth protecting.