The Race to Reclaim the Dark
bbc.com
bbc.com
Last year I spent a few nights in a converted barn in the middle of rural Pembrokeshire and for the first time in my life saw what the real night sky should look like.
I had fairly high expectations going into it and thought it would be cool to see so many stars in the sky, but I didn't anticipate the emotional reaction it would have on me.
When you live in the city it's not just light pollution that's unnatural, but also the noises and scenery you become accustomed to. Road noises, planes, and human voices are basically a constant in the city. It's also rare you'll ever find yourself in a place where you're not surrounded by concrete and other artificial structures. The impact of human civilisation isn't just evidenced by the night sky, but the smells of the city, the concrete you stand on, the artificial noises and sights, etc.
Beyond just the night sky there's something special about just being in a place that's so remote. Especially if you're like me and have never truly experienced being that remote before. Everything feels off, but also right at the same time. It's weird. Then there's the night sky, which is crazy. Stars stop becoming points of light which your eyes can focus on, but basically a blanket covering the entire sky. It's forces you to look at the sky in a way that's completely new, and in a way that forces you appreciate it's size and vastness.
Dark Sky areas are great, but I think for more than just appreciating the night sky. They're also a great way to appreciate nature and it's beauty. It's a full sensory experience and one that might be a little surprising or even overwhelming if you're lived in the city your entire life.
The first time you look up and you feel all alone, like you could fall in the infinite cosmos and nobody can do anything about it, is really special.
You can probably do something similar at a lot of dark sky places, except the vast flatness in the desert means you can walk in a long way in a straight line without interruption. This just adds so much to the being alone experience
One of the things I will show my kids when they are older over and over, like they will have a choice :) That's how I recharge batteries, practically nothing in the city can do that (maybe artificial climbing wall is the closest)
My mother [1], an astronomer at CMU, has been very involved with this effort, and is tracking it with "before" and "after" photography courtesy of the ISS crew.
It is one area of environmental regulation that seems to be pretty easy to make progress on because it's not a partisan issue and the "right way" ends up being cheaper for cities as well as more pleasant.
[0] https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/pittsburgh-goes-d...
In fact, I would even go as far as saying that there are a lot of adults who are physically afraid of the dark. We will rationalize this away with concerns for crime/safety, but it is a very primal fear of not seeing who/what is out there. Our eyes absolutely can (to a degree) adjust to darkness.
Also a proper night sky experience is something I think could really bond us all together.
It’s such a popular phobia that it has multiple names[1].
> We will rationalize this away with concerns for crime/safety, but it is a very primal fear of not seeing who/what is out there.
Yeah, it must be one of the OG phobias. Imagine sitting in a cave in the darkness and the fire burns out…
And a really good song by Iron Maiden.
But couple years ago the fear of the dark hit me, and hit me hard. Overcast fall night at countryside. House enclosed by thick forests. So dark you can barely make out the tops of the trees against the sky. So quiet you can hear the wind and (for the most part) imaginary creatures rustling through the underbrush. Single floodlight illuminating an area just in front of the house. You're standing there on that island of light in a sea of (mostly) still darkness, and a primal fear creeps up your spine, telling you to get inside, hide. Anywhere but in that spotlight, exposed to all the night creatures, but unable to see them.
That's also the moment why it clicked for me why gun ownership was so high in rural areas. At that moment, I definitely wanted some kind of defense against the dark.
The non-overcast nights were amazing because there wasn’t any artificial light for hundreds of miles in any direction with us being in the middle of the desert and the air war going on. Could almost read by starlight.
Also think high gun ownership is more about being able to go murder ducks than being scared of the dark because any responsible gun owner isn’t going to shoot at something they haven’t 100% identified so they don’t accidentally shoot the neighbors out looking for a missing cow or something.
Even in perfect conditions the milky way will never look like the hyper-saturated versions that a camera can capture, because our experience of the night sky is mostly monochromatic.
Hundreds of miles from the closest megacity maybe. You could go a couple miles out of a small rural town and see a brilliant milky way.
They don't look anything like those photos with their strange bright blue and yellow skies though of course, or any terrestrial features lit up like daylight like this! It's all pretty black.
But you can absolutely appreciate seeing the plane of our galaxy from, say, the Australian countryside, outside of the big cities.
And the shadows cast by Venus and Jupiter on a boat and their lines of light on the water. That was close to the Withsundays.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. I often go to some place in a rural area in mainland France, very close to the sea. Night skies are beautiful and I can clearly see the milky way at times. The two closest big city are 46 miles (75 km) south or 70 miles north (115 km). But there's very little pollution: one of the reason is that it's a very sparsely populated sea side (there are vineyards and that's about it) and the other reason is the closest highway is a 45 minutes drive.
> Even in perfect conditions the milky way will never look like the hyper-saturated versions that a camera can capture
I agree with that!
Sadly this is based on age. Younger people can usually see the red and purple colors in the Milky Way. Once you are close to thirty, this ability seems to go away.
[1] "Fundamental Chromaticity Diagram with Physiological Axes - Part 1" (I'm unclear on CIE copyright, so no link, sorry), section 5.6.
It matches my (and a bunch of others’) experience though, for what it’s worth.
It'll be gone soon, though. All these blue LED street lights are a scourge.
But it turns out in most cases the town/city just decide to keep spending nearly the same amount on electricity, and put in brighter LED lights. So now they have a little less electricity being used, and much more light.
Some cities will do trial runs, and ask for feedback from the community. And, people being people, in nearly all cases they will say they prefer the brighter streetlights. So again, we end up with brighter lights.
Not at all. Maybe hundreds of miles from a large city? I'm not even sure about that, but I know you can see the Milky Way fifty miles from a city of tens of thousands.
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info
Clicking on your location/vicinity shows a tooltip with your "Bortle Dark Sky Scale" number, which can be referenced here:
https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/bortle.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
Apparently I've lived in a class 6 or 7 my whole life, and only recall seeing shooting stars camping out in the Sierras, e.g. Yosemite, which is still only a class 2!
You know all those comparisons pre-and-post-photoshop for models? Its same for those over-processed night shots (or generally any way over-processed shots, which most milky way shots are) I turn away in disgust. I understand folks who don't know much about this like it, but once you know what actually comes out of full frame sensor in 25s exposure (even if stacked) there is no way back.
Most pros do this too simply because it sells well to those who don't know better.
The difference is that ridiculous amount over-processing, literally re-painting parts of picture ie to add more contrast to milky way. Once you know what goes inside making of such a picture, as a photographer you can't have much respect there, I know I can't.
Its same as celebrities with unnaturally smooth plasticky skin - when you know how they look like in real life even with tons of makeup, those shots over-processed on top of that look just cheap and bad taste.
Next you will have a disdain for JWST, becuase we do not see IR.
If you haven't had that experience it may be that you've never been to a truly dark site (there is essentially none in the US east of the mississippi) and there is a big difference between kinda dark and really dark, or perhaps because you haven't at the time of year where the MW was extremely high in the sky at the middle of astronomical night or you had pollution from a non-new moon in the sky.
Being able to barely see the MW is what I would describe as the condition under optimal conditions in northern Marin County CA. Which is is urban area and not especially dark but Marian County prohibits outdoor advertising, so it's much better than most places of similar density. Unfortunately even in the last two years the sky brightness has become worse for me.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210712-the-worlds-most-...
As an example of the two co-existing: to get a disabled person from one place to another in a city, you have an asphalt road, next to a concrete sidewalk (that is usually in disrepair and not accessible), next to a firmly trimmed grass lawn. Assuming we kept the asphalt (the heat-radiating is not great), the concrete sidewalk could be replaced by a dirt path with a raised wooden platform, with weeds growing under the platform and around the sides. This create a flourishing microbiome, provides a habitat for insects (which would feed birds) and small mammals, and make a space for pollinating weeds to grow from. The wooden platform would be much easier to repair than concrete and produce less CO2, and would be broken down naturally by microorganisms.
Other first times that give life a lot of texture back:
- first time a dangerous animal looks at you, and there is no wall between you and it. We are not used to be pray.
- first time you get to taste really good fruits and vegetables. Most people think they had. They have not.
- first time you get lost in a wild remote place. The jungle is really scary.
- first time you lose all your stuff (including money and id) in a place you don't speak the language. You will look differently at immigrants after this one.
- first time you see a human dead body outside of a building or a box. The outside sewers in Mali for me.
- first time you use your knowledge of physics or maths to solve a real life problem, and it works. Ok, this one is awesome.
- first time you know you almost died right there.
- first time your car break hundreds of miles from civilization, there is no cell phone, and nobody is coming.
Of course I don't wish you a lot of those. We worked hard at creating a civilization because it's nice to not die from dehydration or a spooked bull.
Random fruits and veggies from the wild mostly taste overly sour, bitter, or under or over ripe.
I would not recommend eating things form the wild unless you really know what you are doing: it's a good way to get sick or die.
E.G: wild carrots and hemlock can look very similar.
I don't know if red light would help with light pollution, but I do sometimes wonder if streetlights could be hooked to motion sensors and only turn on when there are people or vehicles approaching. There are so many towns where most of the time the streetlights are completely useless. I have seen this work in offices with motion sensors for each room or zone that turn the lights off automatically when nobody is around. I would think the sensors would pay for themselves in electricity savings over several years.
It certainly feels right - that lighting would cut down on violent or acquisitive crime, but is it measurable?
You can still have street lighting, but the design of is such that light is directed down towards the ground where it is useful:
* https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/download-view.cfm?Doc_ID=683
If you take directly below the lamp to be 0˚ (nadir), then there should be absolutely no light going above the horizontal (90˚), and the lamp should keep the majority of the light at 45˚, with any spill being container to <65˚ (cutoff angle).
* https://www.landscapeforms.com/enlighten/pages/2-1/BUG-Ratin...
> "If we're exposed to too much light in the evening, our biological clock will delay," Dijk says. "When it's 11pm our biological clock thinks it's only 10pm, but we might not be sleepy yet, so we go to sleep late."
As an immigrant to lands with extreme seasonal changes in the amount of daily sunlight, this does not make a lot of sense to me, and I suspect there is more to the story. People here are no more sleep deprived than anyone else, despite the sun never setting, or always being above the horizon.
Same - I didn't move up North until my 30s. The sun technically goes down where I live, but I have twilight at "night" that is so bright that I can read outside without lighting. During winter, time is just as difficult to keep track of as the sun sets around 2:30-3:00pm: Most of your evening will be in darkness. As a bonus, I get occasional northern lights even though i'm in a somewhat bright city.
~Emerson
People would probably need to start carrying visibility LEDs and I would think a lot of people would need high quality flashlights, but visibility lights and good flashlights are already a good idea.
Blind people most likely.
I consider myself very lucky to be born and live during these disastrous times when we pollute the sky with light.
I'm glad I don't live there anymore.
If one doesn't want light, there is no issue with living in a forest away from cities and civilization.
The effects of 400ppm of CO2 are negligible on an individual basis, you get exposed to much worse in a closed room. There are also regions of the world which will be spared by global warming I'm sure, if one is fine removing themselves from civilization.
That said, some ecological arguments presented in the article are fairly compelling, although more research needs to be done on a) how much light pollution actually is to blame and b) how disruptive to ecosystems the putative increase of bird deaths/disrupted turtle nesting/insect reproduction actually is.
With respect to disrupted circadian rhythms, blackout curtains or sleeping blindfolds work wonders. Though as other posters have pointed out, people living at extreme northern latitudes don’t seem to have any issues during the summer, when it never gets dark at night; indeed, it’s not getting enough light during the winter that causes problems (seasonal affective disorder/vitamin D deficiencies). Many animals living at those latitudes seem to have adapted fine; the same bird species living in Sweden can also be found much further south.
I’ve never understood the emotional argument for dark skies. I’ve seen the Milky Way with my naked eye at night several times, and it was like visiting the Grand Canyon—extremely impressive and worth seeing, but not something that’s so essential to my emotional well-being that I need to see it every night, therefore necessitating drastic measures to ensure everyone can see the Grand Canyon each day.
Maybe it’s the same with this type of pollution? A perhaps necessary step to something better. The evolution continues.
The first time it really struck me was many years ago on a bike trip in eastern Germany. For various reasons I was biking late into the night, and was maybe 20k outside a major city, way out in the country side. I couldn’t see the city itself or any direct light from it, but the sky above it was lit up like a dome of light.
Sound attenuates much faster. If you live in the SF bay area and want to spend some time without sound pollution you can do so easily. Many of our open space preserves are noted for their level of quiet.
I chose where I live partially on the basis that it's extremely quiet.
If you would like to experience an extremely dark sky, however, you'll have to drive several hours and much of the US can't even get to one in several hours.
This sounds like a luxury craving, not a health problem.
I can't experience fresh pineapple where I live, should I force farmers to find a way to make it grow here?
We can still engage in our civilization while minimizing the level that we light up the sky, for example by using fixtures that send light only where we need it and not UP where it does is no good, by not using light when it's not needed (e.g. motion triggered lights, lights that are only on when activities are underway), and by being thoughtful about the spectrum of the light (blue light is poison to night vision and if we used consistent monochromatic light like LPS lamps provided you could filter all of it out with glasses). Like many other kinds of polution the sources often follow a power law where a comparatively small number of sources provide a lot of the light.
All the positives of our civilizations can be met without as much lighting up the sky. ... to achieve the minimal amount of sky lightning for our level of beneficial activity requires more civilization not less.
Light polution also harms wildlife. It may be the least impactful of our pollution but it's pollution none the less.