New Zealand's bid to become a dark sky nation | Hacker News Reader

New Zealand's bid to become a dark sky nation

bbc.com

305 pointsthrow0101a145 comments

I remember the night sky of the 80's in the property of my grand-parents, South of France during the summer holidays: in my early years we had a clear view of the Milky Way... But every year, a larger share of the night sky was turning orange: the near-by city was extending.

Nowadays there are lamp posts on their land and no remaining starts: when they passed away, the city was in the end of their road, becoming a street, and a dozen houses was built on my childhood fields.

Time has passed, and I don't know where I can show the Milky Way to my children.

You can, just go for a camp once in a while

People say this but I've been in like interstates and such and never seen the milky way??

Visit the desert, well off any major highway and it will be very low light pollution. The Southwest has a lot of land like this.

As a 20-something I spent some time in India when backpacking from England to Australia. One of my strongest memories was a safari we did out into the desert on camels, and just laying beneath the night sky. I never would have guessed at that age you can just literally watch satellites go by. I counted about a dozen "shooting stars" before I stopped counting (which is just objects burning up in the atmosphere on entry). The vividness of the clouds of stars was just breathtaking. Never seen anything close to it since.

Great story thanks for sharing. I am from India, and having heard your story, I may try that in the future. Which specific place did you do this in? Near some town or village in Rajasthan? AFAIK that's the only Indian state that has desert (the Thar desert), except for maybe bordering Gujarat state.

Are you making sure to pay attention to the moon cycle? It's important to go at a new moon and definitely not during a full moon

1) Go camp

2) Ensure clear skies

3) Ensure new moon

4) Ensure camp ground is dark

5) Ensure it's warm enough that everyone is happy enough to stay out

6) Ensure it gets dark early enough

It's doable, you have to specifically aim for it though

7) leave the phone in the car/tent/pocket

Even the dimmest display is far brighter than what you want to see.

New moon not totally necessary. Look at moon rise and set times.

Yeah that could be it, not particularly minding moon cycles when just traveling from one city to the other one.

Eyes have to dark adapt, No light, seriously; NO WHITE LIGHT. Takes about 45 minutes to be fully adapted one little flash and you start over.

This is why there are pages out there on astronomy/star party etiquette.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+star+party+etiquette&t=ffsb&ia=we...

Have to get well off the interstate.

I thought I would see some good stars going across Nevada but despite a hundred miles between towns there was always a brightly lit truck stop not far off. And like my sibling comments - nothing kills your night vision like oncoming headlights.

I was pulled over on a rural utah highway in the middle of the night once, leaning back on the hood of my car letting my eyes adjust, and when I finally started to see the fainter stars, I witnessed what I took to be something angelic, blinding white light flying right above me.

I was stunned for a moment but once the car passed from behind me I put it together that their brights bounced off a bat flying low above me.

I had a couple of weeks in Cyprus a few years back,

  * Bortle Class 3-4
  * Artifiical brightness 81.7 μcd/m2

according to https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/

It was lovely and clear every night, I could not only see the ISS pass, I saw something dimmer following it at the same speed - I later found out it was a Dragon cargo capsule

Still very difficult to pick out anything milkyway ish.

I live in

  * Bortle Class 4
  * Artifiical brightness 375 μcd/m2

Can currently pick out the usual - Cassiopea, Orion, Ursa Major, etc, not the milky way. It's usually overcast.

However for picking out a decent number of stars - I was pleasantly surprised one evening on Manly Beach in Sydney (1350 μcd/m2) to be able to see a fair amount of (unfamiliar) stars. I don't go south of the equator much, and when I do it tends to be for work and I'm in a city - I had some time in Sydney though, and it was clear.

I live in a rural Australian city and can regularly see the Milky Way from my back yard on clear cold nights. We do get light pollution from the city around me if there’s any type of moisture or even the tiniest amount of cloud but that just makes the Milky Way itself blend in and the stars themselves are still incredible.

I moved here from a big city so I never get sick of it, regularly just lying on my back on the grass and staring for a bit while taking the bins out at night.

Despite being a big fan of the idea of Starlink etc, I do (literally) see the concerns about their sky pollution though. It’s very jarring how many more satellites you see moving around the sky in the last few nights and they’re bright enough to cause you to require a few minutes adjustment afterwards until you can see the dimmer stars in the areas they’ve passed. Eg they basically “wash out” anywhere they’ve been for a while.

It's that adjusting that's the problem in the UK - it's winter that the nights are dark enough at a reasonable time, which means sitting outside in the dark with no lights for an hour at near freezing temperatures.

* Bortle Class 8-9 * Artificical brightness 8650 μcd/m2

Ah, London, truly world class.

(Although I suspect there's parts of Greenwich Park where you could get it down to a 6, maybe? Top end, near the tea hut, if anyone is familiar. Middle of Oxleas Wood as well except that's obviously full of trees blocking the sky...)

It's an interesting experience where you live in a place to pick out the usual constellations like you mentioned and get used to finding them with ease, but take the trip to the dark sky spots and be blown away how those seem to disappear in the noise of the rest of the sky. It always takes a wee bit for me to get my bearings. And I love having to do it each time as it reminds me to slow down and enjoy being away from it all to where that view is possible.

At the Oregon Star Party! After you eye are dark adapted (an hour) see your shadow on the ground from the light of the Milky Way.

https://oregonstarparty.org/

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/44.3092/-120.2062&laye...

Perhaps more usefully, contact your local Astronomy clubs.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-clubs-organizations/

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Astronomy+club+France&t=ffsb&ia=we...

Central Oregon has some amazing night skies. Went to Hancock Field Station as a kid for astronomy camp and it was incredible.

Rural areas in the PNW are about a 2 on the Bortle scale, and the stars are strikingly vivid. The first time I saw Starlink with my own eyes, I was making an alpine start on Mt St Helens. The cluster of satellites against a backdrop of bright stars was breathtaking, and I got this powerful sense that we were truly conquering the heavens. You could call this another form of light pollution, but it made a pretty big impression on me. It felt more like science fiction than reality.

I'm guessing there is a local effect of the Bortle scale because when the skies were clear we clearly saw about 30 Starlink sattelites and according to https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ we live in an area with Bortle class 8-9, the algorithm for calculating the Bortle class seems to be a bit work intensive. https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/bortle.html

Starling visibility is due to how far up they are and only visible for a while after launch. Once they're in position you shouldn't be able to see them.

if you ever find yourself in the area, Mt. Rushmore has free parking at night and despite the monument itself being lit, there's pretty much no other lights for quite a ways, such that on a clear night the Milky Way is visible all around it, it's pretty stunning.

Pinnacles national park will do nicely.

Nimbyism is rampant the developed world over.

As is trolling.

Go for a holiday on the island of Formentera, south of Ibiza and only accessible by boat. It sounds expensive but it really isn't.

In the middle of summer at 1-2AM there is the most incredible view of the Milky Way, it really is breathtaking.

A couple of years ago I had a coworker ask me if I had ever seen the Milky Way, after he had finally seen it for the first time. He must have been maybe 25 at the time. I was taken aback by the question, and felt sad for him that he had never experienced this awesome sight.

It's never too late I guess, but this made me wonder what proportion of people had never had this opportunity. I've read stories of people calling 911 to report strange lights in the clear skies when it was visible; some of those are likely apocryphal but I'm sure it happens.

Argentinian Patagonia. I was there in December. Drove 30min on a dirt road to the middle of nowhere and I found myself in space. We even saw that comet that’s flying nearby with just binoculars

La Palma in the Canary Islands passed a law in 1988 "to protect the quality of the night sky for the purpose of astrophysical observation" [1]. This seemed primarily for the benefit of large international optical observatories on the island. Not sure how they're that's faring after the recent volcanic eruption, but the law seemed quite strictly enforced when I visited a few years ago - streetlightling intensity was low and there were very few (if any) floodlit buildings.

[1] https://www.starsislandlapalma.es/en/the-island/the-sky-star...

Tucson Arizona is well known for having a strong night sky protection law. It sure makes the street lights in that city very different.

Kyba and colleagues found that streetlights accounted for just 13 percent of the city’s total light visible after midnight. That number would jump to 18 percent if the city did not dim the lights. This means most of the light is coming from other types of artificial lighting.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148259/experimentin...

Yes. External house lighting, especially in higher-than-average-crime Arizona, is probably going to keep the numbers up. Also headlights from cars, though there shouldn't be much of that past midnight.

Do external lights prevent or reduce crime? If so, by how much?

Ever walk around in a bad area at night with few lights?

My experience. Was waking in what I thought was a decent area. As soon as sun dropped sketchy looking character were everywhere. Just standing around doing nothing. I assume selling drugs. When I got back to an area with better lighting they were all gone.

If you are in a bad area you are in a bad area. Just seems like correlation.

Lots of downtowns are very different depending on time

Two things:

* You don't want your house to be the juiciest target. Having lights prevent it from standing out as a place where someone could just hide in the shadows.

* Lights make your cameras more effective.

I'm not really living in a bad area (town homes go for around $1 million here), but we are close enough to a large unhoused and/or drug-seeking population that we still get a lot of property crime (mainly smash and grab on street-parked cars, but you see people going around looking into houses as well). So while everyone on my street is fairly wealthy (and can be relied on to let you know if something is wrong), we still have to do our due diligence (lights, motion lighting, cameras).

Lots of anecdata here but no actual data. If it’s just something that moves crime around, then it’s just people lowering their personal risk to let others pay the externalities. Or maybe external lights reduce the absolute amount of crime. I don’t know.

What kind of data do you want? It isn't like this can be funneled through a controlled experiment, but non-personal security (military, corporate, etc...) has always relied on extensive outdoor lighting to deter theft. My guess is that it is always just a game of whack a mole (the amount of crime stays the same, it just gravitates to less protected houses or less protected neighborhoods).

Why make it sound like cutting down light pollution by a whopping 15% is somehow not significant. If anything, this article explains that there's an obvious and simple way to reduce light pollution by quite a bit.

It doesn't ever require passing any legislation for heaven's sake, it's just a Thursday afternoon municipal planning decision with roll-out spread over a four year period or something to keep costs trivially manageable.

Who said it's not significant?

They're just saying it might not be significant enough to drastically affect the type of lights used, as GP comment implied.

Here's why from later down: “Light-pollution activists and governments have been very focused on street lighting, and that makes sense because it’s probably the biggest single source and the government has direct control over it,” Kyba said. “But my worry is that most of the growth in light is coming from other applications. If we want to reduce the environmental impact of outdoor lighting, it’s not good enough to change to LED streetlights and then stop. We need to think critically about all the different types of light sources there are.”

Right, but that's still a weird way to focus on it. Of course it's not enough, but it's a fantastic easy step in a multi-step solution.

As far as I can tell, Tucson's sky protection regulations aren't limited to stopping streetlights. "With major astronomical observatories within close range, city leaders enacted an outdoor lighting ordinance in 2012 that requires fully shielded lighting and sets limits on the total light produced at night, especially in natural areas and areas close to astronomy sites."

Edit: The gp does mention street lights in the second sentence but that doesn't imply that's all that's done. And hey, no, that's not all the Tucson does.

https://www.darksky.org/nights-over-tucson/

Kitt Peak Observatory is 50 miles west. When I went on the tour they said that they get more light pollution from Phoenix 140 miles north than from Tucson. The streetlights in Tucson have covers that direct the light downward which also saves energy because you are not wasting the light going up into the sky where it doesn't help any people.

> artificial light is increasing globally by at least 2% every year

Um this is scary, isn't it? I want cities across the world to start switching over to low pressure sodium lamps. Yellow light for the win!

Isn't low pressure sodium vapor a dead technology?

It's still used ... so, no?

High pressure sodium is very common and still available. Low pressure sodium is extinct. The last LPS lamp was made in 2018 I believe.

It's a shame, because LPS was the gold standard for astronomy as the hyperspecific emission spectrum made it extremely easy to filter out for astrophotographers and telescope users

it's totally possible to make leds with similar properties, but it's generally but done because narrow spectrum lighting messes with color perception

Dark Sky approved products:

* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus...

I also like sodium lighting, especially the LP variety (despite the fact that all the mystic about orange light helping sleep has been basically debunked), but it is still light. We should decrease light pollution, not simply change its color.

Anyway, sodium lamps are being replaced by white LEDs.

Blue light doesn't suppress melatonin production? Got a reference for that? This was afaik a reproducible result.

A Time article [0] reports on this paper [1] that reaches the same conclusion as the user's comment. However, it's a mice study, which is an important limitation because rodents are nocturnal, according to the Time reporter.

Meanwhile, Harvard Health [2] and WebMD [3] also both continue to report that blue light suppresses melatonin production for humans.

From Time: "Animal studies should always be taken with a grain of salt, as they often do not translate directly to human behavior. And there are additional caveats to this particular paper, says Dr. Cathy Goldstein, a sleep specialist at Michigan Medicine. The researchers looked specifically at cones in the animals’ eyes, which detect color, instead of melanopsin, which senses light and is central to the issue of melatonin secretion.

"They also kept light levels dim, regardless of color, which may not reflect the bright lights of electronics.

"And finally, though mice are frequently used in sleep research, Goldstein notes that since the rodents are nocturnal, they may respond differently to light than humans do. Taken together, Goldstein says these conditions mean the study’s results apply only to a very narrow set of circumstances and metrics. “For this to get extrapolated to saying ‘blue light at night isn’t bad for you’ is a little bit of an extension,” Goldstein says."

[0] https://time.com/5752454/blue-light-sleep/

[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)...

[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...

[3] https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-blue-light

Yellow light is horrible though. It seems to make everything really dark in my neighborhood. Most parts of the city are switching to white LED lights here and they feel much better.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. My neighborhood went from yellow, sodium lighting to stark white LEDs a few years ago. The result, to my eyes, is that the contrast between what is lit by the street lights and surrounding dark areas is much higher. Perhaps what is needed is better diffusion onto the ground.

Or 2000K wide spectrum LED lamps vs doing stupid 6000K-5000K LED lamps at night and messing with human sleep cycles even more :/ Or causing nausea with the narrow spectrum yellow sodium lamps.

the problem with 2000k lights is that human night vision is much more sensitive to bluer light. you can use about half as much light while appearing as bright by moving to 3500k

That's true. Inside my home I prefer yellow light, but on the streets white light does work a lot better.

I know it's psychological, but white light also gives me a better sense of security walking at night on the street.

There are some weird claims correlated with bluer light... that in public spaces they reduce crime or suicide rates. There's not a lot of actual data, but I've seen a lot of articles about it pop up... maybe it's just everyone's predilection towards easy fixes for complicated problems (like the too-rosy broken windows theory claims)

https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/crime-lights-study

Blue light is generally bad circadian rhythms (animals and humans):

* https://www.darksky.org/why-is-blue-light-at-night-bad/

Another study on crime and streetlights:

> A 2015 study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that streetlights don’t prevent accidents or crime, but do cost a lot of money. The researchers looked at data on road traffic collisions and crime in 62 local authorities in England and Wales and found that lighting had no effect, whether authorities had turned them off completely, dimmed them, turned them off at certain hours, or substituted low-power LED lamps.

* https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/lighting-crime-and-s...

So that 2015 study looks at light versus less light, but the claim I've seen circulated quite often is that the color of the light makes a difference. It seems dubious and has little backing information... and I guess my question is why it's become such a popular theory.

Blue light is preferred because it makes it difficult (impossible?) to Shoot Up. ‘Reduce crime & suicide’ is a euphemism.

>It seems to make everything really dark in my neighborhood.

When it comes to using lights that actually allow the night sky to be seen, that's kind of the point.

(out of context) It depends, I personally definitely like the yellow variant when it's foggy or snowing. On some days I'm very sensitive to white light (kind of blinds me), I'm currently guessing that it depends on how much I slept throughout the week?.

Here ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Tokyo_To... ) is a pic of the Tokyo Tower in Japan => I read that apparently they often use yellow light during winter on snowy/foggy days to provide a sense of "warmth", during summer they tend to use more often white light => interesting.

Modern LED street lighting is more directional than traditional sodium lamps, and results in less overall light pollution.

Unfortunately it's also:

1. Much blue-er and so WAY worse for people's circadian rhythms 2. Much "sharper" in it's shadows, so you go from blindingly bright to pitch black without your eyes having a chance to adapt, making it unsafer, and making the shadows "darker" 3. Much harder to filter out for astronomers

It's only advantage is really that it's a lot more energy efficient, but it seems like white LEDs are a net decrease to human welfare as opposed to yellow sodium lamps.

Anecdotally, I used to live in front of a park that had yellow lamps and it was never an issue at night, but when they switched to white LEDs my entire house was illuminated with very blue, daylike-like light, really messing up my sleep.

> 1. Much blue-er and so WAY worse for people's circadian rhythms

There is always garbage out there, regardless of product category. For streetlights you can get good products. Acuity's Autobahn Series ATB0:

> White Light: Correlated color temperature - 4000K, or optional 2700K, 3000K or 5000K, all 70 CRI

* https://img.acuitybrands.com/public-assets/catalog/122046/at...

* https://americanelectriclighting.acuitybrands.com/products/d...

* Via: https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus...

> 2. Much "sharper" in it's shadows, so you go from blindingly bright to pitch black without your eyes having a chance to adapt, making it unsafer, and making the shadows "darker"

Lighting and crime (prevention) is debatable:

* https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/lighting-crime-and-s...

Further, glare can blind people so as to not being able to see in darker areas:

* https://cescos.fau.edu/observatory/lightpol-security.html#Gl...

> 3. Much harder to filter out for astronomers

IMHO we can start worrying about this after we actually reduce light pollution. If we're at the point that astronomers can actually do useful work around large urban centres then let's start worrying about spectrum. As it stands they probably can't do much of anything now.

> Much blue-er and so WAY worse for people's circadian rhythms

Is there a solid research behind this? I know it was intensely shared, but it that real or is it just some idea with none to very limited backing like learning styles.

Maybe something in the temperature you want but more efficient than sodium lamps?

Other than seeing space what’s the downside of artificial light exactly? The article doesn’t really spell it out.

It affects bird migration, results in algae blooms when near lakes, harms navigational instincts for species including sea turtles, and negatively impacts nocturnal species. There’s a good summary here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_light_pollution

artificial lights do mess with wildlife a lot. https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/wildlife/

Many animals use light or the absence of it as a guide to do various things, so when we artificially extend the day cycle with night pollution it disrupts them in a myriad of ways.

It disrupts insects (and thus, everything downstream of them in the food chain):

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210317141651.h...

Also effects human sleep cycles.

The effects of artificial light are manifold. Assigning upsides and downsides is left as an exercise.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=light+pollution+human

Also note humans seem to have an inherent "light budget" the cheaper it is, the more we use.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=historic+light+cost+v.s.+use&t=ffs...

Everything people mentioned is true. Algae blooms, insect disruption, confusing newly hatched baby turtles, all sorts of impacts on human health, etc. But one thing often left out of the conversation around light pollution is the impact it has on plants. Many plants heavily depend on the photoperiod to tell what time of the year it is and when it should bloom. Similarly to insects, the impacts it has on plants can have a lot of downstream effects on the entire food web

Ultimately, we'll never probably be able to measure the full range of impacts it has though. It's a really complex issue

It's a nuisance for sleeping. It appears to be bad for bugs, birds, nocturnal animals in general. It's certainly bad for sea turtles. I'm not sure what else, but man... this is one of my pet peeves. Almost every neighbor in my neighborhood has some kind of outdoor lighting that they leave on all night. I simply don't understand it, and it annoys me any time I'm out in the back yard around the firepit, looking up at the stars.

I took the family to the Mount John Observatory near Lake Tekapo here in New Zealand thru the Dark Skies Project.

It was quite impressive.

As was the considerable efforts the town of Tekapo has gone to in order to limit light pollution with all external public lighting.

Just south of that location is an NZDF training area where one night I was able to observe an object burn across the night sky thru a night vision monocular and a thermal sighting system during an overnight training activity.

The seemingly substantial size and slow speed of the object going across the horizon from east to west was really unsettling, but there was nothing in the news the next day.

Several years later at an Act in Space Hackathon an attendee helped me determine that it was likely a booster stage breaking up from a Vandenberg Air Force Base launch.

Growing up in Oregon during the 90s, I remember seeing the stars every night very vividly. As an adult now, the last time I got to see a great view of the Milky Way was on Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. It really is something else. Light pollution has pretty much destroyed any of the stars everywhere I have lived.

Can anyone link to a photo of the sky taken from such a location which doesn't have HDR cranked to an 11.

Different cameras have different dynamic ranges (pro cameras can have much higher dynamic ranges than an iphone or even a consumer DSLR), so what dynamic range do you find acceptable? (Also it's pretty hard to show via a digital image what your naked eye would see, since the eye has a high dynamic range.)

HDR isn't just about the range of the camera. It's about the range compression used to go from the original light intensity to the 8-bit JPEG rendered in your browser. The image in the article has very aggressive, nonphysical tone mapping. If they didn't, the bottom of the scene would be black.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping

I do a lot of astrophotography in California mostly -- https://instagram.com/dheeranet/

That said, cameras are inherently much more sensitive to the naked eye, and if you expose for even a few seconds you'll get an image that is far more than your eye can see, let alone hours which are normal for astrophotography.

To add to that, your monitor only has about 8 bits of dynamic range, which is far less than your eye has, so it's not really possible to represent an image on a monitor exactly like it looks to the eye. You'll end up with a lot of black pixels or a lot of white pixels.

It's not really possible to describe what the sky looks like to the eye using photographs. If you're US-based, I'd really recommend a trip to a dark sky national park such as Death Valley, Lassen, or even Pinnacles.

I agree with you, but it's important to note that the 8 bits of dynamic range are not in constant luminance steps. The gamma of most monitors is about 2 (1.8-2.2) or square law. This is done to roughly match your eye's sensitivity. So those bits have a range of about 64,000,000:1 in brightness. What your monitor can do?? Well, that depends a lot on your monitor and the background illumination of the room.

Human eyes have about 25 stops of computational dynamic range (about 7 stop without the stuff the brain does), cameras only win because they can do crazy long exposures and are not continuous video cameras like eyes are.

And camera's photos are at most 14 stops. I look forward to a world one day where digital cameras can do the full 25 stops without all the computational tricks the human brain does, it's going to be cool! Also looking forward to 10 and 12 bit displays to start becoming standard with the HDR push in consumer video. Maybe one day we will get a 25 stop display too!

> Human eyes have about 25 stops of computational dynamic range (about 7 stop without the stuff the brain does), cameras only win because they can do crazy long exposures and are not continuous video cameras like eyes are.

That may be true, but your eyes have an aperture of 'only' 7mm (when you're young). That's not a lot of area for photons to get into.

Get a pair of cheap 7x35mm (or 7x50mm) binoculars and now the aperture is 5-7 times larger (and the area is more, per πr^2).

What are these "stops"? Bits?

In photography terminology a "stop" is a factor of 2 in brightness.

For example if you reduce your aperture to 1/2 the area that's reducing by 1 stop.

If you dial your ISO (sensitivity) down from 200 to 100 that's 1 stop.

If you reduce your shutter speed by a factor of 2 that's 1 stop.

If you make your flash twice as bright that's 1 stop.

They're called stops because these controls on a manual camera actually have click-stops. You turn the aperture 3 clicks in one direction and your shutter 3 clicks in the other direction and your image brightness stays the same. Or you turn your ISO 2 clicks in one direction and your flash 2 clicks in the other direction and your image brightness stays the same.

Nowadays most modern equipment has click stops at 1/2 stop or 1/3 stop increments depending on the brand.

25 stops of range means the ability to resolve a dynamic range of 1 : 2^25.

It's not really bits per se, because the error in measurement also grows with the value, i.e. it can likely resolve the difference between a value of 1 and 2 but it cannot resolve the difference between 2^24+1 and 2^24+2.

Thanks for your elaborate answer. I had never (consciously) heard the term.

I’m sure we could dim the cities after 12am. Also lights are not the solution to crime, it’s merely preventing some symptoms rather than addressing the actual issues.

I think it would be great to also impose noise limits/ car curfews.

> Also lights are not the solution to crime, it’s merely preventing some symptoms

Mitigating symptoms and working on the "root cause" is a prudent approach when dealing with life and death matters.

I wish them all the best. There's nothing like a clear dark sky.

Meanwhile, my neighbors are all doing their best to recreate daylight brightness all through the night with flood lights in their driveways, begging for ever brighter street lights, etc.

I feel like more than half the population would truly end nighttime if given the opportunity.

>begging for ever brighter street lights

And near me that seemed to mean they also need to be cool white LEDs (which, being more efficient than what they replaced, will be run brighter) tilted slightly upward so they shine both into the sky and second story bedrooms.

Agreed. I've seen plenty of street lights that have diffuse, warm/yellow LEDs and a good downward pattern.

But my city keeps insisting on installing the blinding cool LEDs that cast everywhere! I don't get who thinks these look good, except that some people associate the cool temperature = modern.

Then again, when I walk around at night, I see a lot of houses and apartments lit up with wildly different bulb temperatures, or cool color temperatures in their living rooms. It would drive me crazy but it's possible some people don't notice these things.

We do this in our house. We have intentionally done this based on the use of the room. Laundry room/kitchen/bathroom, light that sucker up. Living room or bedroom, not so much.

Yeah temperature by room makes sense to me. Or even the adjustable temperature bulbs to fit mood/time of day.

I'm referring to when I'll see a dim warm yellow bulb in a lamp, with the most sterile cool bulb in a ceiling fixture, all in the same room.

I use yellows in lamps and blues in the ceiling. The ceiling lights are turned on only when I need to really see what's going on (cleaning, can't find something, etc)... most of the time I'm using the lamps.

> cool color temperatures in their living rooms. It would drive me crazy but it's possible some people don't notice these things

That's a deliberate choice for me. I have colour temperature adjustable lighting, and prefer the cooler temperatures (~6500k), particularly when reading.

I moved into my current home about 2 years ago, and it's been a slow process to replace cooler lighting with warmer lighting. Part of it is that it isn't a huge priority for me, other part is that it feels bad to take out and toss perfectly working bulbs just because they're the wrong temperature.

What I did is used the cooler bulbs in different rooms. Like my electronics lab where I need strong light to solder, and the bathroom where I don't spend a lot of time anyway.

A bit off topic but I never understood why the higher Kelvin numbers are called cooler. The bluer hues are actually the colours from hotter stars hence the higher kelvin numbers (which are temperatures)

Anyone knows where the cool/warm terminology comes from?

And yeah I hate when my bulbs aren't matched. It already annoys me that I can't exactly colour match my IKEA RGB bulbs with the warm/cool ones. They just won't do the exact same hue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature

Color temperatures over 5000 K are called "cool colors" (bluish), while lower color temperatures (2700–3000 K) are called "warm colors" (yellowish). "Warm" in this context is an analogy to radiated heat flux of traditional incandescent lighting rather than temperature. The spectral peak of warm-colored light is closer to infrared, and most natural warm-colored light sources emit significant infrared radiation. The fact that "warm" lighting in this sense actually has a "cooler" color temperature often leads to confusion.

There are Dark Sky approved products that aim down, reduce glare, and have the proper (<3500K) colour temperature:

* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus...

Interesting, I'm curious if it's just that brand ( https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-indus... )or other designs like it.

My street has a very similar design, I wonder if it's compatible with what you're saying, maybe just not certified.

The terminology in question is "high/full cutoff":

* https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/nlpip/lightinganswers/light...

There are standards (RP-33-99, RP-2) from folks like:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminating_Engineering_Socie...

* https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-2...

* https://www.shine.lighting/threads/122/

* https://www.denvergov.org/files/assets/public/doti/documents...

IES TM15 11:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVPbuq4g5W4

* http://www.escolighting.com/PDFfiles/BUG_rating.pdf

Generally you don't light to illuminate more that 60˚ from the nadir of the lamp:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir

Having grown up with 24 hour daylight from May-August, I would absolutely end nighttime if I could!

Permanent daylight really makes life a LOT better.

When I read this, I think that no matter how much New Zealand eliminates their light pollution, there may be satellites and other things in space that impact their views of the sky.

It has me wondering, how is space governed and how do we want it to be governed?

With your naked eye, you won't be able to see them, except on deploy, which most of the pictures you see around are. The satellites themselves are getting better at "being dark" and the image processing algorithms are getting better at removing them, so I don't think it will be much of a problem, specially for deep space astronomy that is nearing a revolution with more launches more cheaply.

Astrophotography might be a different story, but I haven't seen much uproar after the dark starlink satellites got deployed, but maybe I didn't look hard enough. Either way, it is still a smaller problem than ground light pollution, so maybe fixing that can give us more slack to deploy more stuff.

Ah, I'm glad it doesn't seem to be as big of a problem as I had been reading before.

Also still curious about the general "how do we regulate a global space with national governments" problem.

It's regulated by most countries having signed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Specifically in this case it's covered by these four items:

  * outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;
  * States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities;
  * States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects; and
  * States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.

Thusly: the US is free to use space as it sees fit and thus allows US companies to use it as long as they follow US regulations. If the US or a US company damages property of another country then the US is liable for such damage (and can be billed for the damage/cleanup) and the US is responsible if SpaceX fills orbit with debris.

NASA and the US have also recently created the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Accords which are a interpretation of sorts of the outer space treaty and some nations have signed on to that interpretation, which has these bullet points:

> The Signatories commit to plan for the mitigation of orbital debris, including the safe, timely, and efficient passivation and disposal of spacecraft at the end of their missions, when appropriate, as part of their mission planning process. In the case of cooperative missions, such plans should explicitly include which Signatory has the primary responsibility for the end-of-mission planning and implementation.

> The Signatories commit to limit, to the extent practicable, the generation of new, long-lived harmful debris released through normal operations, break-up in operational or post-mission phases, and accidents and conjunctions, by taking appropriate measures such as the selection of safe flight profiles and operational configurations as well as post-mission disposal of space structures.

Ah I hadn't known about these, while I assumed there were probably some international treaties or standards orgs, this helps me better understand the current state, thank you.

I guess I often feel pessimistic on how we govern global interactions, through the UN, treaties, and/or associations. Maybe it's my Americna background shining thru, something just seems so distant about it and voluntary. The new accords you sent don't have the backing of many of the major nations and maybe there's just a part of me yearning for a more powerful and representative org to stitch together the nation-states of the world, just as the US Constitution more strongly knitted together the American states into a federal government.

But maybe it's not necessary. I just worry about what happens when conflict happens and there's no (powerful) overarching org to help resolve it, seems we may just resort to war or other forms of inter-national violence.

You can very much see deployed satellites with your naked eye. The ISS can even get about as bright as Venus [1]. Other satellites aren't as bright but still visible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

Iridium flares are a big thing though. You won't see them all night but around dusk and dawn, when the sats are lit by sunlight but the ground is dark, they can definitely be seen very easily.

Iridium flares don't happen anymore. All the Iridium satellites that flared were de-orbited a couple years ago. They were replaced with a new constellation (Iridium NEXT) that has a different antenna design which happens to not flare.

In any case - there is somewhat of a disconnect between international media saying "New Zealand does X!..." - broadly implying the cooperation and vision of an entire country - and the reality on the ground, which is that the average New Zealander has neither heard nor cared much about the issue; with the vast majority of the NZ population living standard western lives in bright urban centres which by their very nature preclude astronomical suitability.

What NZ does have - much like neighbour Australia has at larger scale, with it's endless barely-inhabited deserts - is large swathes of sparsely populated rural and semi-rural regions. And it's generally these which are lending themselves to this interest. Efforts to enhance and protect that status are just the icing on the cake.

This conflating of two different types of things is quite bad in my opinion and it wrecks credibility. Real light pollution (not satellites) completely obscures the night sky from view. Satellites do not in fact obscure night sky viewing in any way (you've always able to see tons of them at night in dark areas even before Starlink), they don't even obscure amateur photography, it just takes a bit of software work to remove them. The only reason non-astronomers are up in rage about Starlink is because of "billionaire boogeyman scapegoating".

They are ONLY a concern for professional astronomy using super sensitive huge aperture astronomical telescopes. They raise the noise floor of the CCD because of oversaturated pixels spilling energy into other pixels. Which is why companies like SpaceX have worked with those people to reduce the brightness to reduce that affect. Even then, for many types of observations they are not an issue. See: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument...

I was not trying to conflate two things, I was mostly trying to highlight and ask about how we govern orbits that don't abide by national land boundaries.

I'm not sure how it wrecked credibility, as I don't think I said that getting rid of light pollution would have no effect—I feel pretty certain that without light pollution, one can see so much more of the night sky.

That being said, yes, I was unsure to which extent, once light pollution was minimal, that satellites would obscure the view, mostly to the naked eye. I know that sometimes when we cut out signals, others will appear more prominent, as just as when the house is quiet I hear the fridge and other sounds that I wouldn't normally here.

So if the satellites aren't that bothersome to the naked eye (or to cameras and astronomers) then I'm relieved to hear that and grateful for you pointing that out.

I still think the main purpose of my OP was to ask about how we govern global spaces with national governments.

Interesting they use the Church of the Good Shepherd as the title photo for this. You'll find Mt. John observatory nearby, and the local region is already designated a dark sky area.

The interesting thing however, is the local township of Tekapo is booming in population due to... well, boomers. Tekapo is a nice place to settle down, plenty of retiries from Christchurch have built homes there and the size of the town has grown massively since the first time I visited it 20 something years ago.

Unfortunately, I don't think the dark sky reserve will get in the way of further expansion. Mandated blackout curtains and low light street lamps can only go so far to combat the ever increasing light pollution in the basin.

Unfortunately pt2 for Mt John observatory, it's survival has been in trouble before as the latitude is serviced by better telescopes in Chile. Therefore it's lacking investment drive for better instruments / expansion etc.

In Australia we have a Dark Sky park at the Warrumbungles where the Siding Springs Observatory lives. IIRC we also have some of the radio-quietest parts of the Earth where the SKA is being developed.

I love the idea of making the whole country a Dark Sky park.

Agreed! I had the joy of visiting the Aoraki dark sky reserve in New Zealand a few years back. The night sky was surreal: I have never seen the the galaxy so clear and bright before.

Visiting a Dark Sky park was one of the highlights of my life, and I'm jealous of New Zealand expanding the concept.

I should probably take a vacation there at some point, once the pandemic ends. I miss traveling. I spent nearly two months outside of the US in 2019 (Japan and Germany) and it was awesome.

Having visited a ton of countries I have to say new Zealand is the most beautiful and diverse country in terms of scenery I have visited. Really good choice. Too bad it's so far away from Europe

> Conference delegates from around the world were concerned about the world's increasing light pollution and its proven negative effects on human health…

Could someone point out what proven negative health effects this article is referring to? Is it just from light pollution or is it also from indoor lights during evening and night time as well? I can only guess that the circadian rhythm may be affected with bright lights after sunset.

Isle of Man is another great dark sky nation. Almost all their street lighting in the whole country is turned off by 1am, so it is dark-dark at night:

https://www.islandescapes.im/blog/holiday-makers/Isle-of-Man...

Its good with dark night to be able to watch the stars and our place in the universe. Also remember seeing stars as a kid just walking outside the house on the country side.

I often wonder, is there any reason our street lights don't use lamps that only turn on, or only turn on fully when human activity is detected.

Very good initiative and I think that Australia won't have any problems with dark skies, considering how sparsely populated most of the continent is. Have a look at these dark skies maps:

https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

https://www.cleardarksky.com/maps/lp/large_light_pollution_m...

As much as I would love for NZ to become a dark sky nation, this BBC article is the first I have heard of it.

Meanwhile our cities are all replacing sodium street lamps with vastly overpowered LEDs.

So I'm officially coining the phrase "Astronomy Economy".

Although I've no idea how to make mad profits doing so. Maybe NFTs, something, something.

What are they going to do about that 10s of thousands of Starlink satellites that will start interfering with observations?

The newer Starlink satellites have a sun shield. That should, in theory, make them impervious to observations.

Where "impervious" means you can't see through the the sun shield either.

At their size (10m x 2.8m), it probably won't even measure a full pixel.

That's much less of a problem. A bright point in the sky will bloom in the optics and blot out a larger space than it occupies. A dark spot doesn't.

Starlink satellites aren't really naked eye visible anymore except in cases where they flare from lucky angles. They're around magnitude 6.5 which is basically at the limit of human vision.

""I see 10 or so shooting stars every few hours I'm out here. Lately, though, I'm seeing more and more man-made pollution like Elon Musk's SpaceX satellite."

I'm a strong proponent of fighting light pollution (sky glow is horrible), but I'm totally against people trying to mislabel satellites as light pollution. One of the cool night sky observations you could do was to catch Iridium flares. Also it's completely impossible to determine without looking it up if the satellite you're seeing is a starlink satellite or not. I further doubt that that person is seeing them as those things are 6.5 magnitude which is nigh impossible for a human eye to see. There's LOTS of other satellites, much larger ones. If you go to a dark sky site you see satellites all the time, and I saw plenty before starlink as well.

The title has "bid to become" duplicated.

> New Zealand's bid to become bid to become a dark sky nation

Love it. Title needs fixing needs fixing though.

yeah should be: New Zealand's bid to become a dark sky nation

Whoops! Fixed. Thanks!

This article needs to be more readable. Or at least easier to skim once.

But this is a great initiative. Hope NZ makes progress.

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