The number of simple astronomical observations even our Stone Age ancestors had at their fingertips now seem to be beyond the grasp of the average city dweller.
Most people in the so-called civilized world do not know the moon is often visible during the daylight hours, Or that the full moon rises at sunset and sets at dawn, or any of the simple relationships between moon phase, time of night, and day of the lunar month. Even people who are outdoors all the time; cops, sailors, farmers, etc now work under artificial light and are unaware of the existence of the rest of the universe.
A whole generation of kids who have never seen a dark, starry sky or the Milky Way are now reaching adulthood. They can explain to you all about UFOs, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle, though. Many college graduates today cannot understand why we have seasons, or how the path of the sun in the sky differs between summer and winter, or why we can't see the Southern Cross from the USA or how to point out the North Star.
Until science fiction shows like Star Trek became popular, most people could not tell you the difference between a star and a planet, or a galaxy and a solar system, or a comet and a meteor, and hardly anyone can give you a reasonably accurate definition of the word "constellation". But the saddest thing is not that people don't know these simple facts. What really hurts is that they don't care whether they know them or not.
In a related issue, I was watching a TV show the other day where the talking heads were making fun of John McCain because he was obviously computer illiterate, and he didn't use the right jargon and phrasing when discussing computer and internet-related issues. The fact that the man flew jets in combat and routinely landed and took off from aircraft carriers seemed to go right over these hip "techies" heads.