Going Green Means Going Dark
This month’s SciHealth Theme is about going green and the environment.
As a stargazer, a very important environmental issue to me is light pollution. For many of us the night sky is all but gone, only the brightest stars are visible from our homes and the Milky Way is all but extinct.
Going out in my backyard is more of an exercise in shielding my eyes from streetlights than it is trying to find objects. I don’t need a flashlight to see where I’m going in my backyard, there is more than enough ambient light to, not only set up my telescope, but the read the labels on my eyepieces and even read my starcharts.
All of this ambient light makes my backyard useless for stargazing, I need to travel at least 30 minutes by car to get to some relatively dark skies. Even then, I am plagued by the sky glow of nearby cities like Boulder and Denver.
I’ve written many times about losing our dark skies and how important I think it is that each of us do something to try and reclaim them. I’ve written letters, joined the International Dark Sky Association (IDA) and had the city put shields like this on street lights near my house:
This shield, by the way, is useless, I appreciate the city’s effort, but this doesn’t really help. It still casts a huge amount of light off to the sides, and while it prevents the light from shining directly in my face, there’s still too much light thrown everywhere else spoiling my night vision. I’ve talked to the city engineer about better alternatives and he said he’d look into it.
One of the things that goes with advancing civilization and our associated technologies is more light, I understand that. I am not advocating that we use less light, only that we are smarter about our use of it. It’s a trivial matter to install light fixtures that shine light on the ground where we need it rather than up into the sky.
If it’s important to you that we can look up and see stars, planets, constellations and the Milky Way, then here are a few things you can do:
- For starters, I recommend that you install one of these light fixtures on your house.
- Go to the IDA website and educate yourself on the problem.
- Write or call your city engineer about getting full cutoff fixtures or shields put up on streetlights near your home. If you are a homeowner, your property taxes are paying for those lights, so you have a say. I’ve found the cities near my home to be very responsive to the idea.
- If you’re worried about security, install one of those motion detector lights.
It’s a real shame that we are losing our connection to the night sky, I think this affects us in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. In my opinion, it’s one of the few environmental issues that we can easily solve.
Image Credit: NASA
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