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City Lights To Dark Skies - International Dark Sky Week 2014

submitted by Ickster

1 decade 1 week ago

[From the Bad Astronomy post where I saw this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/23/light_pollution_what_you_can_do_to_keep_the_sky_dark.html]

This week, April 20 – 26, 2014, is International Dark Sky Week, a global effort to get people to appreciate the skies above them. Light pollution — excess light thrown into the sky by street lights, houses, buildings, and pretty much everything that makes light — reduces our ability to see the stars, sometimes dramatically. I lived in Chicago for a year, and on the clearest nights I could only see the very few brightest stars, struggling against the mighty orange glow of the city projected upward.

This light is wasted; it’s money thrown away, it’s low-efficiency, and in many cases the lights being used at night aren’t really doing a good job of illuminating the ground and making it safer.

Astrophotographer Mark Gee (who has been featured on my blog before; see Related Posts below) made a short and lovely video to highlight the issue. His work is stunning, and well worth your time.

4 Comments

lurgee

says...

http://www.darksky.org/

siftbot

says...

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by lurgee.

Enzoblue

says...

Took my nephew to Cherry Springs in Pennsylvania - darkest spot in PA. He didn't even know you could see the milky way and was out of his mind. I was too really.

Ickster

says...

As a kid, I was really into astronomy, but was always bugged by the fact that books would talk about seeing the Milky Way at night, and about the thousands of stars in the night sky. I figured there was something wrong with my eyes or something, because I could never find the Milky Way, and while I never counted the stars, I thought there were only about a hundred at best.

Then when I was about 12, we went camping and on a night with a new moon, I went outside the tent after dark. I looked up at the sky and literally got dizzy at the stunning revelation that was the real night sky.

Nowadays, I always try to plan family camping trips around the new moon so my kids get a chance to see the real sky, but even out in the middle of nowhere it is getting increasingly difficult to find a spot without at least one glaring streetlight or security light.