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The Illuminati Project Pushes For Dark Skies In 2009
An anonymous reader writes "2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observations of Venus, Saturn and Jupiter published in Sidereus Nuncius ('Starry Messenger'). To improve scientific literacy, the NOAO and NASA are promoting dark-sky initiatives in 2009 to draw attention to the problem of light pollution which obscures nearly all night sky colors and objects except for the moon and a few bright stars and planets. Project Illuminati is a Flickr project by James Cann to showcase the beauty of light pollution to raise awareness and educate fellow Earthmates to lower energy consumption and become more curious about our place in the universe."
Here in Quebec, one of our parks is actually also protecting the sky. It's a world premier and it is possible. Also, having more efficient lighting saves money so everyone is much more happy from it. http://www.sepaq.com/En/Pages/COM/popUp.cfm?no=588
In Galloway in Scotland, the local tourist board is trying to set up a dark sky park. The area that they're planning to open it is apparently the darkest place in Europe.
There are already two in the US, in Utah (http://www.nps.gov/nabr/parknews/news040507.htm) and Northern Pennsylvania (http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/stateparks/parks/cherrysprings.aspx). This BLDGBLOG article mentions suggests World Heritage sites for experiencing darkness, set up to protect dark areas: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/dark-sky-park.html
I recently visited Poland (Krakow) and there the level of street lighting was a lot lower, resulting in reduced light pollution. Streets were mostly lit with light reflected from buildings. It's surprising to be able to see the night sky from the middle of a city of 1 million. It's not comparable to countryside darkness by any means, but it really changes the character of a city.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Whenever I explain your point to other people, they look at me like I'm from another planet. I usually tell them that if they really want lights, they should use red lights and explain to them why it doesn't ruin their night vision and why astronomers and photolabs use red lights.
There are plenty of areas around which are void of lighting. Often times lights are necessary for safety and although you may be able to encourage people to use mirrors and what not to maximize the amount of light hitting the ground rather than going up into the sky, you're not going to have much luck getting populated areas to turn down the lights much. Lighting helps avoid crime.
You can't have a dark city.
The government should just make sure they have large enough plots of land that keep the cities far away so people can go visit and view the dark sky.
Work Safe Porn
There are a lot of things people can do to stop light pollution without increasing risks.
The easiest example I remember is streetlights that use cones to direct the light at the ground instead of letting it escape every direction including up into the sky. The amount of light we have on the ground remains the same and light pollution is noticeably reduced by this simple example.
Thanks for making me waste a mod point by replying to your knee-jerk response.
- I'm also confused by their campaign choice, let's stop light pollution cause it's so.. beautiful!
My neighbors are typical americans - they came out into what was the countryside (our house was in the middle of nowhere for decades, now it looks like suburbs.)
After they built their McMansions, closer together than some of the houses in the city, using up the woods and fields I used to romp in, they installed huge arrays of sodium-vapor lighting on their houses, which they leave on 24 hours a day. For "security," or to make it homey, or whatever.
I used to go in the back yard to stargaze, I could even see the aurora borealis sometimes - in NY! We never even bothered to replace the outside floodlight over the driveway for years after it died, but the latest thing for all these new people seems to be to have a gazillion lights. Houses, cars, SUVs, three-wheelers, all festooned with lights - long driveways lined with bright lights left on at all times.
I don't get it. Why do people move out to the country if they don't want it to be like the country?
This space available.
In order for the light to remain the same, you'd probably have to reduce the power to the lamp.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
As the cost of energy rises in the medium future, I think this will sort itself out. Towns will question why they are spending so much on lighting and cut back. Generally, households use all they electricity they can afford so rising prices will make people cut back. People don't (usually) run the AC in the summer with the front door wide open. People don't like heating/cooling the outside. It's too expensive and wasteful. Similarly, I think people will curb their habits of trying to light entire cities at night.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The problem is that you only get dark corners if there are lights nearby. If not, people will see you move around in the dark.
What about switching to blue lights? I saw some shots of streets where they had switched to blue street lights(Japan, I think) and not only did it seem to help with light pollution but according to the article it actually saw a reduction in crime where the blue lights were in place. They weren't sure why exactly, there was some speculation that it caused criminals to pause as it was harder to judge where they could and couldn't be seen, or perhaps the color simply made it harder for them to judge their target, hell who knows. But if it works we could have a win/win here. Because from the pics I saw there was plenty of light from the blue street lights without the spreading that you see from the white. And as a plus it looks really pretty at night.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Global dimming specifically measures the reduction in the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface of the Earth because of atmospheric aerosols. It has only been measured for fifty or so years and does not take into account the reduction in surface irradiance that has occurred because of natural or man-made causes in the the nearly two hundred years prior to when record keeping started. Aerosol Optical Depth as well as 'plain old' Optical Depth, are measures of the transparency of an optical medium -like the atmosphere- at optical wavelengths and have a greater effect on dim, point-sources, of light -such as stars- than they do on brighter extended sources of light -the Moon and the Sun- since small aerosol particles in the atmosphere have a greater tendency to scatter the light -which reduces the apparent brightness and increases the extinction- of point sources. If the atmosphere was truly 'clean', then the only phenomenon that an observer would have to contend with is 'Rayliegh Scattering'. A short article over at 'Sky and Telescope's" site, ties it all together. The reduction in atmospheric transparency since the Middle Ages due to man-made pollution has, by some estimates, reduced the brightness of the stars in the night sky by as much as twenty-five percent. There was an article published last year -that may have been mentioned here on \.- that discussed this very situation. Unfortunately, it escapes both my memory and that of Google.
Sig this!
drive for a couple hours
You're lucky if you live somewhere where darkness is only a car drive away.
The islands that constitute my home country are pretty thoroughly populated, so there's no direction in which a couple hours' drive would get you to a dark spot; I'd have to drive a good distance into the neighbouring country. Not something I'd do for casual stargazing to awe and inspire the kids!
"Good news, everyone!"
What is really sad is that I live in a city where you can only see one or two stars. We went out to a park on the edge of the city with some friends and their kids. It got dark, which happens early at this time of year in the UK. You could see about fifty stars in the sky on the side opposite the city and their kids were saying "wow, look at all the stars".
If they travelled about 30 miles they would have been able to see a thousand or so and just made out the milky way. If they travelled 100 miles they would have seen real dark skies - but they had obviously done neither.