On October 12, 1983, an explosion at a power station plunged two square miles of Los Angeles into total darkness.

The Griffith Observatory on Mount Hollywood was inundated with calls asking what was wrong with the sky: It had a bright band of light streaked across it.

What people were seeing for the first time was the Milky Way, billions of stars that appear clustered together in a great hazy band of white.

In Vancouver, a similar thing happened during the last week of August. The R.H. MacMillan Space Centre (Vancouver Planetarium) was flooded with calls from people asking what the great orange ball was in the eastern sky. Was it a giant weather balloon? A UFO?

"They were seeing the moon, a big beautiful full moon," says Wanda La Claire, astrophysicist and show producer at the Planetarium. "Can you imagine people asking such a thing? But many people are not used to seeing the night sky and the moon in all its phases." Full Story