I'm 30 and I've lived in the city my whole live. Occasionally I'll go on holiday to more rural places, but until last year I had never visited a Dark Sky area.
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.
I always though a lot of human arrogance would melt down if we had to regularly spend a few days in the desert. It resets your internal scale: nature is big, you are small, cities are amazing oversized camp fires that help us forget that fact for the night.
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.
There's a pretty cool experience to have that I learned from attending Burning Man that they call taking a "space walk". You basically just start walking towards the horizon away from the main camp. As you get further away leaving the noises and lights of the event behind you, you just become eneveloped in the silence and darkness with the only thing visible are the objects in the sky.
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
Completely agree, I remember the first time I realised the earth is really a spaceship, cruising through more beauty than the mind can comprehend, that experience was in the desert.
I do weekend camping out in the alps whenever I can (which isnt much recently due to having kids and broken foot). Its always amazing, maybe also because its not every evening, but the sight works with something inside. Summer, winter, anything in between. Using my few skills to get through the night (ie finding out that air mattress was leaking, its midnight, -15 and I've already dig 1m hole in the snow and built it all), cook some food, see milky way and mountains. Guessing animals from weird sounds they make. Waking up in completely different scenery just due to light.
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)
That sounds amazing, I‘d love to do that with my daughter (7 yrs old). Any areas in particular you can recommend, maybe easy ones to get started, especially with younger kids?
We managed to successfully pass lighting regulations in Pittsburgh last year [0] which will result in about 40k city lights being replaced with much more dark-sky-friendly hardware.
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.
My personal theory on this is that we have multiple generations of people raised in an urban environment who have by now no awareness or exposure to what 'normal' darkness should be.
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.
I thought I was okay with the dark. I've done a lot of running and hiking at night. If I have to get up at night, I won't turn on the lights at home.
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.
There was this one time during the first gulf war when I was walking back from the company CP on an overcast night where I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I had to wait for a lightning strike, walk a bit in the right direction, wait for more lightning, rinse and repeat. Kind of amusing to be honest and it took a while to get back to my hole.
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.
Small personal bugbear about images used to illustrate these articles: in the clearest of skies the naked eye can barely see the milky way unless it's a new moon and you're hundreds of miles from any town.
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.
> in the clearest of skies the naked eye can barely see the milky way unless it's a new moon and you're hundreds of miles from any town
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 mean yea, sure, it doesn't look identical to a super long exposure photograph, but in a really dark sky with dark adapted eyes the milky way casts a visible shadow! It is absolutely and utterly striking and not monochromatic. There is nothing ambiguous or barely about it.
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.
The largest stars I saw in my life (they really feel closer and larger) were above an empty campsite half a day west of Uluru on the Great Central Road, August 2003. The dust clouds in front of the Milky Way had a 3D feeling, a presence on their own and not a lack of whiteness. I had to take off my glasses to find the brightest stars and constellations because all of them seemed to have the same brightness (was I overexposed?) and there were too many stars anyway.
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.
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.
Lens transmission of blue (say <450 or <500 nm) declines with age - looks vaguely like 2% per year ages 20 to 60.[1] Thus reduced blue-yellow contrast perception in elderly. I don't know of any age-related change in red perception... perhaps those colors were off?
[1] "Fundamental Chromaticity Diagram with Physiological Axes - Part 1" (I'm unclear on CIE copyright, so no link, sorry), section 5.6.
Let me try to find some sources, this is so widely known and accepted in the photography (specifically astrophotography I guess) community that I have never bothered to look for sources.
It matches my (and a bunch of others’) experience though, for what it’s worth.
Those milky way pictures are not so much about long camera exposure but rather tons and tons of after-processing mostly in Photoshop (did quite a bit of night sky photography with full-frame camera). Literally painting some areas with black and massively highlighting colors which are barely there.
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.
My experience is different. Sensitive camera with a fast lens feels sort of like a night vision. In my case sony a7iii + 1.4 24mm lens can see so much more stars in Berlin. And that's on relatively fast shutter speed (hand handled) with no processing. Yes longer shutter speeds, contrast boosting, stacking etc then multiple this effect to another level.
Oh you can see many more starts, milky way is more clear etc that was not the point. I don't have much different setup (Nikon D750 + 20mm 1.8 which is actually a bit bigger glass than yours), but when you take picture from camera, its completely different from what you typically find presented from amateurs and pros alike.
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.
I thought these led lights are good for light pollution because they're more directed straight down and don't leak as much up? I think there are there other issues like sleeping cycle stuff. Maybe I'm misrembering?
A lot of the companies selling LED streetlights to municipalities will claim improvements in light pollution, because you can, in fact, get many more photons per watt with LEDs than with high pressure sodium (or whatever your local incandescent street light is using).
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.
You're forgetting that the color of the light doesn't care about how it was made. If the LEDs being installed were in the warmer color temp direction, then they would be better for the foggy/moist air; nevermind the bluer color's affect on circadian rythms.
> Small personal bugbear about images used to illustrate these articles: in the clearest of skies the naked eye can barely see the milky way unless it's a new moon and you're hundreds of miles from any town.
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.
I was in a DSP over the weekend that is ~20 miles from the closest town of 1,000 or more, and after about 15 minutes I was able to see the Milky Way pretty clearly. I could also see the faint glow of 2 cities maybe 40 and 60 miles away on the horizon, so I knew that they were there.
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.
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!
One thing that I wish the article would've covered is how light pollution affects sleeping patterns for humans. Light pollution is one of the big problems with cities considering how lights both installed by the government and private individuals are poorly setup and waste most of their lighting potential on illuminating the sky or things further away than intended. If governments were more serious about this, then we could have well lit cities that don't constantly blast all their light into the sky or into bedroom windows all the time. Just a tweak in design or placement is often all it takes to minimize light pollution.
We should add "Nature" as a basic human right. Whatever your geographic region would normally have in the absence of humans, every person living there should be able to experience it. That could start with more trees and native plants, more dark sky friendly lighting, and expand to rewilding and unmanaged natural growth.
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.
The first time I saw the night sky in an area with little light pollution is something I hope I'll never forget. I was at a campsite on the coast of denmark, not somewhere particularly rural or far from the nearest town (the campsite itself was quite big and fancy with a large pool and spa, etc).
I got up in the middle of the night to go the toilet, and when I saw the sky I just stopped and stared for a long time. It really does look like those photos you see, for example the first image on the wikipedia article for the night sky is similar to what I remember, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_sky.
I could see too many stars to count, shooting stars, I could even just about make out the milky way. I actually had trouble picking out constellations because the usual reference points just didn't stand out amongst the noise.
I later moved my sleeping bag outside and fell asleep looking at the sky.
It's kinda crazy not knowing what the sky, the biggest most omnipresent stuff in our life, looks like, is now the default for us.
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.
I was recently on a tiny island in Puerto Rico and noticed they had changed all their streetlights to red. It turns out they were confusing turtle hatchlings. The hatchlings would normally follow the moonlight out to sea but were being confused by the streetlights and would end up dying after going the wrong direction away from the water. Apparently the red light is not as visible to them so they don't get confused.
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.
Street lighting at night was introduced because it greatly reduced crime in urban areas. I wonder if this initiative will come at the cost of increased crime in some areas.
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).
It also seems that it would reduce the fear of crime, which in most cases is more significant to people (causes them more discomfort / trouble) than crime itself.
> "The biological clock is more sensitive to blue light than longer wavelength light, or warmer colours," says Derk-Jan Dijk, professor of sleep and physiology at the University of Surrey.
> "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.
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...
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.
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."
The End of Night, by Paul Bogard, is a really enjoyable read on this topic. Touches on humanity's relationship with light, both pros and cons, without being dismissive, condescending, or patronizing.
I'm all for it, unless there is some disability group I'm not aware of that would be significantly harmed or something.
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.
I grew up in a pretty rural area surrounded by fields. I had a skylight for many years as well. Looking up at the stars on a night with no moon is so special. I feel grateful I had that experience on a regular basis for so many years.
You're conflating the desirable effect with the unhelpful externality: that we engage in activities that benefit us vs that we also scatter light into the night sky that does us no good and only harms us. The former is something to be proud of, that latter is something to minimize.
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.
I mostly agree. Comparing light pollution to air/water pollution is a huge stretch; photons are not comparable to soot, sulfur oxides, microplastics, or mercury, to name a few.
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.
We can evolve while also avoiding harmful things. Environmental regulation has made life better for a lot of people and so would a reduction in light pollution.
I think that sound pollution is more harmful. But it is just me, I like seeing that there is a life in the city at night. I can cover my windows if it bugs me, but I insulating my home more against loud sounds is quite hard and much more costly.
You can block out light, but you can't regain the sky that way.
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.
In my experience most dark sky advocacy comes from the work of scientists who agree that artificial light is great, but it can be even better (for health, safety, environment, etc.) if you only use it when you need it, and you only point it where it needs to go. That’s basically the core of the argument. Hope I helped shed more light on the topic for you!
A couple of hundred years ago, the unfiltered fumes from coal plants and factories were considered signs of human evolution.
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.
I spent a couple of years living in a paper mill town. When the wind blew right, it smelled like humid vegetarian farts. Certain locals brushed that off: "Smells like money to me."
By most metrics compared to the past you're very lucky to be living in a time where we pollute the air with toxic fumes and the sea with plastic, they're both evidence of our civilizations' evolution as well as causally linked with tremendous progress.
The “if <people> don’t like <x>, they can move” template has never been very convincing, and I think in this case even less so, since it’s about citizens seeking what they believe is an objective improvement for all. The point of light pollution advocacy isn’t to make cities worse; it’s to make them better. Light can be used in a thoughtful manner that promotes a healthy sleep cycle, that provides aesthetic improvements for the city and the sky, that conserves energy, and doesn’t negatively affect the wide variety of plants and animals that depend on light to determine the season, or navigate by the stars or moon.
That same logic works for toxic fumes and plastic.
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.
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.