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Idaho Wants To Establish America's First 'Dark Sky Preserve' (idahostatesman.com)
schwit1 shares a story from the AP:
Tourists heading to central Idaho will be in the dark if local officials get their way. The first International Dark Sky Reserve in the United States would fill a chunk of the state's sparsely populated region that contains night skies so pristine that interstellar dust clouds are visible in the Milky Way... Supporters say excess artificial light causes sleeping problems for people and disrupts nocturnal wildlife and that a dark sky can solve those problems, boost home values and draw tourists. Opposition to dark sky measures elsewhere in the U.S. have come from the outdoor advertising industry and those against additional government regulations.
Researchers say 80 percent of North Americans live in areas where light pollution blots out the night sky. Central Idaho contains one of the few places in the contiguous United States large enough and dark enough to attain reserve status, Barentine said. Only 11 such reserves exist in the world... The proposed Idaho reserve is mainly land managed by the U.S. Forest Service and contains the wilderness of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area... Leaders in the cities of Ketchum and Sun Valley, the tiny mountain town of Stanley, other local and federal officials, and a conservation group have been working for several years to apply this fall to designate 1,400 square miles (3,600 square kilometers) as a reserve. A final decision by the association would come about 10 weeks after the application is submitted.
Researchers say 80 percent of North Americans live in areas where light pollution blots out the night sky. Central Idaho contains one of the few places in the contiguous United States large enough and dark enough to attain reserve status, Barentine said. Only 11 such reserves exist in the world... The proposed Idaho reserve is mainly land managed by the U.S. Forest Service and contains the wilderness of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area... Leaders in the cities of Ketchum and Sun Valley, the tiny mountain town of Stanley, other local and federal officials, and a conservation group have been working for several years to apply this fall to designate 1,400 square miles (3,600 square kilometers) as a reserve. A final decision by the association would come about 10 weeks after the application is submitted.
Clearly the government doesn't want dark skies. It'd make it too easy to spot the UFOs on their way to & from Area 21.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wish it and THEY WILL COME! From MARS!
Now I know, the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, but do you want to take that chance, because what if they COME!?
Sounds good.
I thought the main opposition from dark sky projects usually came from those arguing that street lights reduce crime? A lack of advertising after dark is a good reason for dark sky preserves plus it also reduces energy use.
Here in South Australia, the Astronomy Society of South Australia is also involved in this process, applying to the International Darksky Association for formal accreditation of the Mid-Murray region ( http://www.rivermurraydarkskyr... ), a very sparsely populated region with significant areas of national park. I'd be interested to know know the differences in local legislation/recognition required between the US and South Australia. I'm not involved myself, but from what I've heard the local council here are very supportive.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
That has to do with what?
Here are some more facts: 1) Silicon Valley is an overpriced bubble. 2) The tech industry and startups are not the savior of the universe.
That has to do with what?
The fat asshole known as cdreimer needs to build up his karma in order to validate his existence on a website he considers to be irrelevant.
I know, it doesn't make sense to me either, so just mod him down.
I have never seen the night sky here. It's just an orange glow.
Pushes buttons on a lot of people!
The DPRK and most of Africa are dark sky preserves already. Why does the US wants to follow the example of O'l Kimmy?
There already is a dark sky preserve in America. It's located in southern Quebec, Canada, around the Mont Megantic observatory.
Why do we have to shine all that light into the sky?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'll offer that the few times I've been driving through the middle of frelling nowhere in the middle of a clear night, I've been awed by the number of stars visible and the scene above me. Stop, kill the lights, and stare up in wonder...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I heard before you became a world-renown author, you were quite the musician.
With LEDs, the challenges in outdoor lighting we faced years ago are fairly trivial to solve. There are a few code changes that are required (1 foot-candle/10 lux minimum exterior egress pathway lighting to the public right-of-way being the dumbest), and a little more regulation in a few areas to keep people from installing ineffective "glare bomb" wall mounted lights.
Even lighting a billboard with zero uplight isn't that hard, and with a dark sky you use a hell of a lot less energy.
Switch to sodium-vapor lamp and observatories can filter out the narrow notch of orange-yellow light it produces. Or use smart lamps that permit the scheduling of lowering of the level of street lights.
With highways that are mandatory self-driving you could also eliminate street lights and headlights.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm nearly 50 years old and I've seen the Milky Way once-- when I purposely drove to see it on a moonless night.
I fall in neither camp. I think there is artificially limited supply.
The few times in my life that I've been in a truly dark place under a clear night sky have all been amazingly awe-inspiring.
Either you believe in the free market, and housing in the Bay Area is correctly priced based on supply and demand.
The "free market" in most metropolitan areas are skewed towards luxury housing because it has the highest profit margins for developers. They have very little interest in building affordable or entry-level housing. While most politicians lament about the lack of affordable housing, they won't say no to the tax revenues that come from residents who can afford luxury housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park
Switch to sodium-vapor lamp and observatories can filter out the narrow notch of orange-yellow light it produces.
Doesn't help visual observation of the night sky. It's beauty is not only about measuring space with expensive science toys.
eliminate street lights and headlights
Bwhahahahahahaaaahahah
The "free market" in most metropolitan areas are skewed towards
Really, Chris, put a *little* effort into your writing.
must be a socialist then. ;-)
No such thing as 'free markets' complexity theory proves this. Also supply and demand does not set prices.
We are talking about central Idaho. Hardly anyone lives there in the first place. Also, good luck getting cell phone service.
Source: Me. I live in Idaho.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Switch to sodium-vapor lamp and observatories can filter out the narrow notch of orange-yellow light it produces. Or use smart lamps that permit the scheduling of lowering of the level of street lights.
Using both approaches would be of greater benefit. There is no reason at all to have light leaking skyward, it's both a waste of energy, and pollutes the night sky for ordinary people to observe.
With highways that are mandatory self-driving you could also eliminate street lights and headlights.
Most self driving systems rely on visual observations to stay in the lane. Tesla's stated goal is to be able to do full autonomy with only normal camera's and not the whole ladar gizmos that Google uses. Unless we start building other kind of track and location information into the roads it would be hard to make sure that you stay on the road. Headlights should be sufficient for this, and streetlights not needed.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
35 years ago, there wasn't a glow on the horizon: A measure of creeping suburbia. I reckon there's been 1,000 houses built outside the city limits in that time. The result has been those dust clouds becoming invisible. The sky no longer emits an eerie glow, the distant suburbs do.
How are they pasting your URL all over Slashdot?
Variations of this post has my URL in it. Usually in response to my comments. However, there are side discussions I'm not involved with that also get this post.
While I agree you contribute next to nothing to Slashdot, posting 12 times a day is hardly doing "nothing".
As creimer, I posted 25 to 50 times per day. I posted 8,000 comments in ten years, and 4,000 comments this year. If only my wanker trolls had left me alone.
You still haven't explained why you're suddenly posting under cdreimer, and why at first you claimed to be a "noob" and not Creimer The Repulsive.
You still haven't explained why you're suddenly posting under cdreimer, and why at first you claimed to be a "noob" and not Creimer The Repulsive.
My wanker trolls insisted that I post as cdreimer and this account is only four months old. And here's a side dicussion I'm not involved with.
Strange, you feel you are owed a correct price by society. Why is this?
Nobody insisted that you post under "cdreimer". And since when do you take orders from trolls?
As usual, nothing you say makes any sense.
"And here's a side dicussion [slashdot.org] I'm not involved with."
Sure, you just magically happen to link to a post that you're "not involved with", with a very strange and coincidental "AC" reply somehow defending you.
How very odd!
Please link to all these trolls "insisting" that you post as cdreimer, even though you claimed to be a "noob" at first.
What a curious person you are.
As creimer, I posted 25 to 50 times per day. I posted 8,000 comments in ten years,
Ten years is 3650 days, at the low end that makes for 91000 posts. There are 83000 posts missing, Chris! Oh my god!
WHO STOLE YOUR POSTS!!!
As usual, your stupid lies and exaggerations are easily shown to be nothing but puffery and cartoon boasting.
You're such a child.
There is nothing like the undiminished beauty of the night sky. Go find an open field somewhere and go stargazing, if you've never been. Learn the constellations if you have time, yes, but just seeing the entire vista, lying down and opening your eyes as wide as you can and consciously taking in visually as much as the sky as you can is amazing. It's criminal that so many kids never get to see that.
Real lawyers write in C++
you sound bitter, lead tits
You always write the same thing when defeated, Chris. Why don't you turn the other, well-muscled leg (think professional cyclist, football player and cable rower) and let me hump it??
and leave their porch lights on at night, and the dark sky reserve will be no more
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Only 'free enough markets'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I assumed you packed up a telescope when you looked up, so put a filter on it. Orion sells a wide range of filters. And while they are not super cheap they are in the price range of a hobbyist, especially one that was willing to travel to Idaho.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Most self driving systems rely on visual observations to stay in the lane. Tesla's stated goal is to be able to do full autonomy with only normal camera's and not the whole ladar gizmos that Google uses. Unless we start building other kind of track and location information into the roads it would be hard to make sure that you stay on the road. Headlights should be sufficient for this, and streetlights not needed.
It's my job actually. So you don't need a full spectrum of light for it to work. And if you've seen what training is like for night driving you'd realize how wrong you are about current computer vision systems. The systems are definitely designed to not need street lights, so there is the bigger half of the two down for astronomy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's natural law, not society.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You always write the same thing when defeated, Chris. Why don't you turn the other, well-muscled leg (think professional cyclist, football player and cable rower) and let me hump it??
I'm not Chris, asshole. Some of us don't like his trolls because they pull the same fucking shit over and over again. Get a fucking life.
If you're upset at people that " pull the same fucking shit over and over again"... you couldn't pick a bigger target than Chris. Literally.
"Get a fucking life."
you sound bitter, white knight tits
Lasers are narrow spectrum. The Mako Shark was a Corvette concept car. A meme come true.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Correct. Nimby bullshit keeps the rents artificially high in SF.
And the free market, like democracy, tends to work best when people aren't idiots. People are never going to stop being idiots, so no form of government or economy is ever going to lead to mythical utopia.
We should probably quit while we're ahead: a few bizarro enclaves (SF, NYC) counteracting by the greatest lifting of people out of poverty the world has ever yet seen.
Society is a natural law as well, unless you bootstrapped yourself up from a single cell in the ocean.
I know your type.
Can you explain why you wrote camera's, but systems, observations, gizmos, roads, headlights, and streetlights?
I'm fascinated by this. There must be a gene somewhere that encodes a trigger neuron... "look out! Here comes an s!"
weird... red states only cared about guns and the bible
Are you 12? Just swearing repeatedly and not really saying anything, an obvious moron.
So, yeah. It's probably CDReimer posting as AC.
I was stationed in Idaho in the 80's, on the way back from camping in the mountains we were traveling down a pitch dark dirt road for like 30 miles late at night, i looked up and told my friends to pull over , they were like why? We pulled over,shut off the lights and when our eyes finally adjusted, there was the milky way, and it was breathtaking! We all climbed on the hood and lay back on the windshield for an hour, just mesmerized by all the stars, best trip ever! You don't realize how much sky youre missing until you see it from a pitch dark location, this needs preserving!
In Altadena, north of Pasadena, California, there nicknamed "Christmas Tree Lane." It is just a street. For decades at Christmas tree lights have been hung from the trees in December, and across the street over the road. The usual street lights are turned off. Driving down the street with your lights turned off is--magical. Or fun. The low level lights, just your basic traditional incandescent X-mas outdoor bulbs (unless they've changed it recently) are more than enough to drive by on residential streets.
General factoids on dark skies and lack of lights:
A large and larger percent of the world's population have little or no access to dark skies. At least one poster above noted he had never seen truly dark skies until he was about 20 years.
A large percent of the world's population has little or no experience simply being in darkness.
I've been an amateur astronomer for over 20 years. I have to remind myself than I can set up and take down over pounds of telescope, mount, tripod, etc. in the dark, but most people *think* lights are required to do things. Yes some people are afraid of the dark, but lot more people have little experience of it. Their mind set is "light is normal, why would you not want to have lights?" Thus, for many people nighttime and outdoor lights become a self-perpetuating necessity.
If you have never experienced a very sky just to look at, I urge you to go on an expedition. Just get out in the dark, maybe bring a lawn chair, or a sleeping bag to lie on and star gaze. If you have binoculars, use them. Keep it simple, plan short trip. Bring coffee, and dress warmer than you think you need--you won't be moving around like a skier.
Here is a website that shows night sky conditions for observing the sky. I need to drive about 25 miles round trip to find dark skies; this website helps me decide it it is worth going. The link opens to conditions at Mt. Wilson, Calif. On the right there is a small green box where you can click on all sites and look for your area.
http://www.cleardarksky.com/c/MtWilsonOBCAkey.html
A filter is only able to block light. The problem with blocking light is ... you are blocking light. So while it is able to increase contrast between the object and the background sky it doesn't actually make those objects any brighter, quite the opposite. A dark sky trumps filtering every time.
Also for non-visual astronomy filtering doesn't help if your goal is true colour images. A UHC filter or similar light pollution reduction filter massively skews the colour spectrum. Personally I've taken to doing narrow-band imaging and creating false colours afterwards. It does however make stars look like crap without the RGB data.
Chaco canyon is a dark sky park. Or is a "preserve" something different? I was at Chaco last month, the ranger told me they even have a say in what new lighting is put up in the nearest towns.
soylentnews.org
You can already see the night sky in all its glory in almost 1/4 of the continental united states, which is managed by the BLM. You can literally drive into it, if you have a 4x4. Or in the dry season, anything with decent ground clearance. The amount of space with essentially zero lights in it is larger than the entire godforsaken state of Ohio.
Light pollution is stupid, though. When I see a streetlight without a reflector I want to punch someone in the dick.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's probably CDReimer posting as AC.
That's what all my wanker trolls say when a fellow AC disagrees with them. The reality is that you're less popular than me. The sooner you leave me alone, the sooner Slashdot can return to normal.
Your disproportionate ego and narcissism are why we won't leave you alone. You're a human train wreck and we can't stop watching.
The reality is that as long as you pay attention to me, I'm at least as popular as you.
In a city. 1. SHADES that block all the "artificial" light. Fan running, blocks out any exterior sound. Never had a problem sleeping. In fact, I can get up in the morning, leaves, small tree branches scattered in the street, traffic lights not working. Get to work...did it rain last night? DID IT RAIN? That storm didn't wake you up? Nope.
Only a fool would think those 2 places have even remotely similar zoning requirements etc. Hardly even a 'free enough' market if they have completely different rules.
To block out the night sky, to conceal the aliens floating around and visiting this planet. Plus, it makes it easier for the "Area 51" types to covertly spy on people.
his entire COUNTRY a Dark Sky Reserve. Except of course where Dear Leader stands; he glows with the light of a thousand suns, bringing enlightenment, peace, and contentment wherever he walks.
Why do we have to shine all that light into the sky?
Ummmmm, we don't. We shine the light down onto the ground but then the ground reflects the light up into the sky.
Ummmmm, yes we do. Go up a few floors above the level of the street lights and you see tons of light pointed towards the sky. There is no reason to have the bulb hang below the shade.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You don't understand markets, just obviously.
The rules are just costs associated with each place, the person/company gets to choose, based on imperfect knowledge. Free enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's right, expand the definition until words are meaningless and can no longer be discussed. You must be really fun at parties.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A filter is only able to block light.
Yes, that's basically the definition of the word filter in every science.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Correct. Nimby bullshit keeps the rents artificially high in SF.
Well, plenty of people don't think that, say, tearing down the Painted Ladies and replacing them with high-rises is that great of an idea either. There's only so many people you can pack into an area before a lot of them feel like they're becoming rats packed together, and that's no way to live. So yeah, expect opposition from them when outsiders come in and want to develop on top of them.
I would like to have a dark weekends, where city lights are turned off between 10-3AM and homes have their curtains closed.
othing is more hopeful, more enlightening, and more wondrous the a night sky full of stars.
That $100 a month is all he has to look forward to. How can he afford his cliff bars, power bars, and double diet Mountain Dew. Please think of the creimers.
So why do people like you get your panties in a wad when those costs change. Isn't that The Government picking winners.
Try to be a tiny bit consistent.
Information about pachyderms, Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://www.cdreimer.com/slash...
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
-Nancy Guerrero
Then it should be obvious why it is not an ideal solution.
But it's not obvious. It amazing the number of times I've had to explain this to people in various contexts, including at astronomy conventions where people in general should know better.
What's the difference between a dark sky "preserve" and a dark sky park? Glacier national park in Montana is already a dark sky park. It's Canadian sister park Waterton Lakes is as well. In April of this year the combined "Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park" was given a provisional gold-tier designation as "Waterton-Glacier International Dark Sky Park" through the International Dark Sky Association.
-- The first, and currently only, such international / transboundary dark sky park.
(Yes, I am a big fan.)
not bad housing prices, for those of us who like dark skies...