Category: light pollution

Night sky over Flagstaff, Arizona
courtesy of www.scenicreflections.com
From my blogpost, Night Skies, at http://rainsongpress.blogspot.com/2011/08/night-sky.html:

“Growing up years ago in a Cascade Mountain rain forest, hemmed in by tall trees and cloud cover, we didn’t often see the stars.  But on an occasional clear night, we’d go outside, tip our heads back and gaze up in awe at the Milky Way’s glowing path of stardust winding through a billion distant suns. Only the dim gas lamp shining through the living room window competed with the brilliance above. We seldom saw a plane pass over in daytime and never at night. Man had not yet been to the moon or fired a rocket into space.“

 I was pleased this week to receive a message from Lauren Nilson, who’d read this blogpost and wished to share a video she’d helped create. It was filmed on the night streets of Seattle, and is all about the hidden costs of light pollution. The short video is an eye-opener, worth watching several times. Here’s the link: http://www.insurancequotes.org/hidden-cost-light-pollution:

This is the video transcript, from the insurancequotes.org website. Brief, but thought-provoking.

“It’s more than one billion cars burning 2 billion headlights It’s argon gas and less than an inch of tungsten metal swinging naked from the ceiling. It’s beautiful at a distance and blinding the rest of the time. It’s sealed glass tubes, mercury, phosphor powder, free electrons and ions bumping and vibrating and dully humming. It’s 1898 to 1959 the discovery of neon to the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. It’s the las vegas strip. It’s the sunset strip. It’s strip clubs and stadiums . It’s streetlights and streetcars. It’s malls. It’s your work. It’s outside your bedroom window keeping you from sleeping. It’s insomnia. It’s the slow extinction of animals and insects dependent on darkness for migration and mating. It’s the device you obsessively check as you walk down the street raising your dopamine levels while reducing your melatonin. It’s a carcinogen. It’s one of the reasons women in developed nations are five times more likely to have breast cancer. It’s looking down instead of up. It’s 2 thirds of the global population, 5 billion people, unable to truly see the night sky. It’s the indifferent blinking out of 200 billion stars.”

What can you and I do to minimize light pollution? We can choose low wattage bulbs whenever possible. We can choose outdoor fixtures that direct light downward. We can turn our lights off when not using them. If we want to learn more, we can get involved with the International Dark-Sky Association.

Thanks, Lauren!

Night Sky

   “The skies were really busy last night.”

   A friend’s chance remark last week sent us outside to look for ourselves. We really didn’t expect to see much, even though the night was clear, because we live on a hilltop overlooking the lights of town. Streetlights line the roadway in front of our house. So much light pollution washes across the evening sky that only the brightest stars shine through.

    Growing up years ago in a Cascade Mountain rain forest, hemmed in by tall trees and cloud cover, we didn’t often see the stars either. But on an occasional clear night, we’d go outside, tip our heads back and gaze in awe at the Milky Way’s glowing path of stardust winding through a billion distant suns. Only the dim gas lamp shining through the living room window competed with the brilliance above. We seldom saw a plane pass over in daytime and never at night. Man had not yet been to the moon or fired a rocket into space. One night our parents called us out to see falling stars. They called it a meteor shower. We stood for an hour, ooh-ing and aah-ing as bits of debris in a comet’s trail ignited in the earth’s atmosphere and streaked across the starry sky.

    Now we looked for a place where the glare of street and city lights would be dimmed. We found it in a corner of our back yard where house and garage walled us in on two sides, tall fences on the other two. Suddenly, the sky looked black, filled with more stars than we’d seen in years. Some stars blinked off and on as they traveled across the sky. They were aircraft lights, some on planes too far away to be heard or seen in daylight. Other far-away lights were satellites, their movement barely perceptible. The sky was busy.

     Then, to the north, we saw a steady, bright light, moving smoothly along an east-west trajectory. It was the International Space Station. In a few minutes it had passed out of sight, but it would complete its orbit around the earth and we’d see it again in another 90 minutes.

    It felt strange to know there were people up there, 250 miles above the earth, in that largest man-made object ever to be sent into space. Fifteen nations came together to design, build, and staff the space station, and crews will have lived and worked there continuously for eleven years, come November. We tried to imagine what the inhabitants were doing as the earth revolved beneath them. Might one of them have been looking down at the point of light that represented our community? Might he or she have been wondering who was looking up, wondering about them?

    The night sky has always caused humankind to think deep thoughts. But now, if one can find a place dark enough to see it, there’s even more to think about.