What amazes me more then the jet, is the amount of light pollution from the cities.

Yes, and that influence reaches far outside of the cities themselves. I only realized this after moving to rural Canada where on a clear night you would see the sky in a way that you could never see it within 30 km of any major city. It is hard to describe in words, you'd have to go up North during a cold winter night and lay down and stare upwards.

Yeah - sitting on a porch near Newark, NJ, the sky is a bright hazy dome overhead.

It reminds me of growing up in a big city, too - walking along, looking at the multi-colored clouds above me.