Feeling Frustrated? Look Up Tonight.
Go outside tonight and look up. #AdAstra pic.twitter.com/AjdtFjHKRz
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 6, 2022
Go outside tonight and look up. #AdAstra pic.twitter.com/AjdtFjHKRz
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 6, 2022
Unfortunately where I live when I look up it’s difficult to see the stars so I end up more frustrated.
Near the Great Lakes, we’re all about unrelenting cloud cover from November through January. But when you can’t look up, it can be very relaxing to look down: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ES…
Where I live I only see the same 23 stars.
When I lived about 17 miles from downtown Tucson, I’d look at the sky every night. With the light laws in place there (to protect local observatories from stray city light), the night skies were amazing. Stars everywhere. One Thanksgiving a coworker pulled out a set of night vision goggles. Looking at the skies with those on, especially with the intensifier switched on, was gobsmacking and humbling.
I miss those skies.
Many years ago astronomy clubs and associations had quite a bit of success convincing cities and businesses to use shielded lighting fixtures that direct light downwards instead of outwards and upwards. Besides reducing light pollution, the added benefit was reduced electric costs, which I think was probably the main reason that these efforts were so successful.
LED is starting to change all of that. Bright lighting is cheap now. Also people seem to be more concerned about security than in past decades, making it harder to convince people to go with less light instead of more. I see this in my neighborhood, as porch and garage lights are now much brighter than they used to be. Since the newer LED bulbs use so little wattage, owners have no concern about the cost of running bright outdoor lights all night.
The biggest concern however is street and business lighting. In the past couple of years I have started to see very bright square shaped unshielded LED fixtures that point at a 45 degree downwards angle, thus spilling huge amounts of light sideways and upwards. From my house I have a view of a small ridge about two miles away. One night I noticed a bright glow coming from just past this ridge. With binoculars I could even see nearby trees being illuminated. I assumed that it must be a new shopping center. One night I drove out that way out of curiously. It turned out to be a single gas station ringed with ten of these very bright 45 degree unshielded LED lights facing in all directions. It’s almost blinding driving past it. I have since seen several more gas stations starting to use this lighting.
I have also started to see similar 45 degree angle unshielded LED fixtures installed in one corner of an intersection and pointed towards the center, allowing the entire intersection to be brightly lit.
I don’t know if this trend is reversible, even if astronomy groups try and combat it.
I remember that movement back in the day and I was pushing for it. I even had a “Turn out the streetlights and not the starlight” bumper sticker.
My neighbor has one of the bright LED lights. Looking at it it’s very bright but ironically it does a poor job of illuminating anything on the ground.