Dark sky

I recently read an article in The New Yorker about the nighttime sky and its darkness. Even with how much I enjoy astronomy and stargazing, I never gave this issue too much thought before. I just thought, "Hey, it's skyglow, what can you do? Let's find a nice dark spot like out in the middle of Nevada or north of Nine Mile Canyon." Just like the environmentalists tell Owen in the article, it was a soft issue for me.

But let's really think about our relationship with the night sky. Do we have anywhere close to the same relationship with the night today as others did one hundred years ago? No way. We love to light up our skies. We don't care to watch darkness fall and envelop the earth. We like to broadly illuminate our buildings at night, instead of seeing them by moonlight and starlight, instead of seeing their silhouettes and large darkened grandiose, even menacing, shapes against the blueblack backdrop of everything cosmic. We like perpetual day.

If there's anything we can do to better our nighttime viewing--whether it's advocacy, activism, education, sharing these ideas with others, adjusting our homes and yards to use full-cutoff or fully-shielded lighting, turning all lights out at night, calling the city to ask for pointless streetlights to be shut off, or even throwing rocks at those streetlights--we should do it. Also, we should donate to and join the International Dark-Sky Association.

Oh yeah, and vandalism appears to *increase* with more constant lighting. So don't use any lights at all, or just motion detection. And less lighting at night means lots of savings in electricity for everyone. Plus less carbon emissions because of the lessened electricity.

It's just sad to think we'll never see the sky the same as we did when we were kids. The earth's just getting artificially brighter. Even what we see tonight will only get worse and more washed-out. Maybe this is just a soft issue. But I think it's an important one.

Read "The Dark Side" article for more information on all this stuff.