Over 80% of the world’s population & 99% of Americans & Europeans live under "sky glow," where light pollution affects wildlife, human health & our ability to observe celestial objects.
People all over the world are living under the nighttime glow of artificial light, and it is causing big problems for humans, wildlife, and the environment. There is a global movement to reduce light pollution, and everyone can help.
Good call-out! It's very irritating that my hometown #Helsinki is one of the world's top light polluters per capita. Just look at this difference on https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
Interactive world light pollution map. The map uses NOAA/EOG VIIRS, World Atlas 2015, Aurora prediction, observatories, clouds and SQM/SQC overlay contributed by users.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. If light pollution robs us of our sense of awe and wonder and contributes to human hubris when it comes to climate change, conspiracy theories, and ideas about colonizing Mars.
a couple of weeks ago at night we had an electrical outage in Quincy MA, 7 miles from Boston. I could read a book with the light from the city. We need to start thinking of light as pollution and energy wastage.
When I was a boy, I used to get home from the drive in after midnight and just spend some time looking up at the stars in wonder at the infinite billions of them. Now I look up and see a few of the brightest and planets, but it is nowhere near close. Kids these days don’t even know what they’re missing.
I grew up in the Low Desert of California’s Mojave and could see stars from my backyard. Then after moving to the Inland Empire, I’m mad at how bad the light pollution is. On overcast nights, it’s a perpetual dawn/dusk with how much light there is.
I am privileged to live in an Int’l Dark Sky City. At night, walking my dog, the sky’s magnificence dominates the entire field of vision, & I’m located within a sense of wonder, of my place in that expansiveness. This is not fanciful, but real: when I visit elsewhere, there’s a discomforting sense of loss. I wish with all my heart society would value how essential this is, prioritize steps we can take to preserve it. For ourselves, for all life on this planet.
As someone with a telescope and an interest in viewing the stars, I’ve had to make use of a dark sky service which maps the best place to do that relative to me. I can’t really do that where I am because of light pollution. I would have to travel a good three or four hours north just to get to a good place! The cottage in the prairies is remote and a good place but any urban area, not so much!
I will be retiring this year. One of the first things I want to do is find a dark area away from street lights, motion yard lights and go camping. Its been years since i could just sit and gaze at the stars. I need to find that place.
Totally agree with this. Having lived in rural and urban settings I always stopped to marvel at the majesty and beauty of the universe at night when I was out of doors in the countryside. In the urban area not nearly as much...
We should have one night a year where we turn off the lights and look at the stars. A few years ago, we tried driving from Utah toward Wendover looking for a dark spot. About an hour out, we pulled off onto a remote road that turned into a dirt road and finally found a place where we could see the Milky Way.
the crazy thing is even up here in the countryside well outside the Helsinki region, and amidst forests, the council has been adding street lights to roads. Roads with virtually no traffic whatsoever, particularly pedestrians or the like (cars have lights so they should be fine?). I hate it. Nobody seems to want it, yet it just slips through, one road at a time, because nobody bothers raising voices about it.
This is so true. When I moved to the US from India a long time ago, one of the first things I noticed was the lack of stars in the sky when you lie down on the ground and look at the sky. The other thing was the cities in America looked like blotches of yellow light at night compared to Delhi, which at that time looked dark with a lot of fireflies.
For those who have been able to visit or live in a place where there is no light pollution, the experience is almost mystical. So many celestial objects are visible that normally one would not see. I once lived on a remote island. During new moons, the darkness was all consuming. If not for starlight, navigation was impossible.
One of the results of this wretched postmodernism where it seems that only material goods count. So we are overwhelmed by them, they soon become rampant garbage and in the meantime we miss the wonders of nature.
Headlines today discuss the growing possibility of energy and food problems that were first brought to world attention in the 1970's. Films like Soylent Gree...
@sciencemagazine 1/n: Long time amateur astronomer here, since the late ‘80s. There was a period during the ‘90s and early ‘00s where I did a lot of deep-sky (galaxy/nebula) observing from skies ranging from pretty dark (central Illinois) to ultra-dark (remote locations in Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska). Over that time, I compiled a bunch of sky darkness estimates to help me relate sky quality to observation quality.
@sciencemagazine 2/n Fast forward to a year or so ago, looking at these old notes, which used a method much like the one in the linked article (i.e, identifying how many stars I could see in a given area), I compared them to https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/, which uses lighting and population data from 2015, or 15-25 years after these estimates. And one conclusion I came to, over and over again: the skies in the 1990s were significantly darker than in 2015.
Interactive world light pollution map. The map uses NOAA/EOG VIIRS, World Atlas 2015, Aurora prediction, observatories, clouds and SQM/SQC overlay contributed by users.
@sciencemagazine 3/n The really dark sites — the ones more than 150 miles from large cities — hadn’t changed, but just about everywhere else was worse. Rural Illinois. Exurban Michigan. Even the western desert of Utah, almost 100 miles from Salt Lake City—almost certainly noticeably brighter at night than they were 15-20 years earlier.
@sciencemagazine 4/4 And it was more than a little depressing, to realize that many of the places where I first found and fell in love with the deep sky — first the full Messier catalog, then dozens or even hundreds more bizarre and beautiful galaxies and nebulas — were almost certainly much degraded at night, compared to the first decade or two of my life as a devotee of the night sky. /fin
@sciencemagazine @dpnash I remember being filled with a sense of wonder by the night sky as a child/teen in the 80s & 90s at my parents house. It doesn’t look like that anymore.
I was in Tasmania last week & it served as a beautiful reminder of what’s really up there. I suspect if more of us could experience that, we’d remember our connection to the natural world & just maybe, we’d do more to protect it.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's all these sincere, impassioned #Environmentalists who cannot understand why anyone in their right mind would not want to embrace #UrbanLiving - they know not the #TrueBeautyOfNature they believe they're trying to protect.
Night Walker
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Osma A
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Light pollution map
www.lightpollutionmap.infoErika Harlitz Kern
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Martin Vermeer FCD
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in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Jello :pensive_party_blob:
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Dandydan
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Than that feeling of being watched by a mountain lion.
David P
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •At least, that's what I choose to remember most about my otherwise crap trip to Fraser Island (off Queensland coast, now known as K'gari).
#stargazing
Andy Tasker
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Sal Darji
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in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •I've looked for photographs online, but they are all like this one
Cameras don't see stars the way human eyes do
Vihio
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •#dystopia
https://youtu.be/AlVczvB4FQk
Soylent Green Opening Titles
YouTubeSheril Kirshenbaum
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •“Light pollution is drowning the starry night sky faster than thought” https://www.science.org/content/article/light-pollution-drowning-starry-night-sky-faster-thought #space #svience #nature /2
Science | AAAS
AAASCyrus Harmon
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •John J. Dziak
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in reply to David Nash • • •Light pollution map
www.lightpollutionmap.infoDavid Nash
in reply to David Nash • • •David Nash
in reply to David Nash • • •Sheril Kirshenbaum
in reply to David Nash • • •I was in Tasmania last week & it served as a beautiful reminder of what’s really up there. I suspect if more of us could experience that, we’d remember our connection to the natural world & just maybe, we’d do more to protect it.
Lord Kelvin
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •