Why We Can't See The Stars

I went to a nearby town where the high school is thinking of building an observatory for students to use for astronomy programs. We looked around to see where the building might be located. I took some long exposure photographs of the sky to see how badly the light pollution from nearby communities would affect the ability to see faint stars. As you can see in this photo, the "sky glow" from lights in the distance is so bright that no stars are visible near the horizon. The bright object in the upper right is the moon. But that is not the cause of the light pollution. It is a shame that light pollution from man made sources so prevalent that so few people have seen the Milky Way.