Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Late one evening in June of 2016, John Barentine stood alone at Mather Point, an iconic and rarely empty overlook at Grand Canyon National Park. The moon slid away, leaving the darkness of a crisp, clear sky. The stars that make up our galaxy seemed to align overhead. The inky chasm of the ancient canyon spread out below, and he marveled at a feeling of being unmoored in time and space.
An astronomer who worked for the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), Barentine had a special reason to revel in the scene. With his help, the park had recently been given provisional status as an International Dark Sky Park, a designation given to public land that exhibits “exceptional” starry nights. Few publicly accessible places on Earth experience this kind of pristine darkness. Indeed, the view is quite different 200 miles away in Tucson. There, photons from the city’s lights scatter in the sky, forming an obscuring dome of light called sky glow—a feature now common to major cities.
Scientists have known for years that such light pollution is growing and can harm both humans and wildlife. In people, increased exposure to light at night disrupts sleep cycles and has been linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease, according to a 2016 report by the American Medical Association. Meanwhile, the ecological impacts of light pollution span the globe. It can affect the reproduction patterns of male crickets, causing them to chirp during the daytime instead of at night, when they typically call mates. Baby sea turtles, which have evolved to evade predators by rushing to the ocean upon hatching, can be disoriented by lights near the shore. Owls lose their stealthy advantage over prey. Even trees can struggle, holding onto leaves longer and budding earlier than they should because the brightness of their surroundings gives them incorrect information on the time of year.
Astronomers, policymakers, and lighting professionals are all working to find ways to reduce light pollution. Many of them advocate installing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in outdoor fixtures such as city streetlights. Watt for watt, LED streetlights are now comparable in efficiency to traditional sodium vapor streetlights—and are in some cases more efficient. But the crucial difference is that they are better at directing light to a targeted area, which means less light and energy are needed overall to achieve the desired illumination.
Several major cities across the globe, including Paris, New York, and Shanghai, have already adopted LEDs widely to save energy and money. But a growing body of research suggests that switching to LEDs is not the straightforward panacea some might expect. In many cases, LED installations have worsened light pollution. Steering a path toward reducing the problem requires more than just buying some energy-efficient fixtures. Cities must develop dark-sky-friendly policies, and lighting professionals need to design and manufacture products that enable those policies to succeed. And they must start doing so now, say many light pollution experts, including Karolina Zielinska-Dabkowska, an assistant professor of architecture at Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland. LEDs already make up more than half of global lighting sales, according to the International Energy Agency. The high initial investment and durability of modern LEDs mean cities need to get the transition right the first time or potentially face decades of consequences.
Zielinska-Dabkowska may understand the potential and drawbacks of using LEDs better than anyone. In the 2000s, she worked for various lighting companies on high-profile projects, including the Tribute in Light memorial in New York City. The striking installation shoots two beams of light into the sky to echo the two World Trade Center towers lost on 9/11. Soon after it was completed in 2002, the tribute turned out to be trapping migrating birds in its hypnotizing beams.
The piece is now switched off at times to allow birds to disperse, but light pollution ultimately became an issue Zielinska-Dabkowska could not ignore, and she wrapped research on solutions into her work. “I wanted to make a change,” she says.
The growing field of sensory urbanism is changing the way we assess neighborhoods and projects.
There are four main elements of light pollution, Zielinska-Dabkowska says. The most recognizable is sky glow, which can affect migrating birds hundreds of miles away. Another is light trespass, the photons that cross boundary lines. They can creep in through windows and can affect sleep and circadian rhythms. Glare, meanwhile, is a change in contrast—the sort that happens when you walk from a highly lit area into a darker one, forcing your eyes to adjust. Lastly, and most significant, she says, is over-illumination—lighting things up much more than necessary.
LEDs have the potential to combat all four of these problems. The bulbs can, for example, be installed in “smart” housings that can be remotely tuned and programmed. “You can control LEDs,” Zielinska-Dabkowska says. “You can dim them down to 0%.”
[...] Light pollution experts generally say there is no substantial evidence that more light amounts to greater safety. In Tucson, for example, Barentine says, neither traffic accidents nor crime appeared to increase after the city started dimming its streetlights at night and restricting outdoor lighting in 2017. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed crime rates alongside 300,000 streetlight outages over an eight-year period. They concluded there is “little evidence” of any impact on crime rates on the affected streets—in fact, perpetrators seemed to seek out better-lit adjacent streets. Barentine says there is some evidence that “strategically placed lighting” can help decrease traffic collisions. “Beyond that, things get murky pretty quickly,” he says.
Still, the perception of security is a factor that cities need to take seriously, Barentine says. For example, a study published in the journal Remote Sensing earlier this year found that people in various neighborhoods of Dalian, China, felt safer in consistent levels of warm light, something easily achieved with controlled LED lighting.
Many light pollution experts say LEDs simply need to be used to their full potential to avoid over-illuminating the skies. Responsible lighting doesn’t seem to disadvantage anyone, but there’s a mysticism about the night to overcome, Barentine says: “At the end of the day, there’s a real, entrenched human fear of the dark.”
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @08:53PM
Well don't shine the light up there you big dummy! Ever hear of lamp shades? And I think we have window shades to take care of that issue, but the biggest thing is all that light shining up into the air, you already have the easy fix, use it
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crm114 on Thursday August 18 2022, @09:07PM (4 children)
April 2022, I noticed that all the lights in Flagstaff AZ are HPS. Instead of the crazy daylight/bluelight everywhere it was "calming" And did not propagate to the grand canyon.
I asked someone "Its it because of the Lowell Observatory?"
The answer was "Flagstaff is known of the city of the black sky."
So yes. Light pollution is a thing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HammeredGlass on Thursday August 18 2022, @10:00PM
Sounds like a city worth living in.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2022, @12:27AM
It is absolutely because of the observatories there. As I recall, at least the county there has lighting ordinances, and of course, the night skies are very nice.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday August 19 2022, @03:44PM (1 child)
The biggest benefit of uniform usage of HPS lighting is the spectrum has a relatively clean peak, which can be filtered out relatively easily.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-light-spectrum-of-high-pressure-sodium-HPS-and-plasma-lights_fig1_303382506 [researchgate.net]
LED could theoretically have a similar behavior, but we would need to mandate RGB as the technique for producing white light, and we would still have three distinct peaks for removal. Phosphor based LEDs have a broad spectrum that would be difficult to subtract.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#White [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2022, @03:03PM
That's not white and not good for illuminating other stuff though. Bad case scenario is some stuff looks black or dark grey because none of the narrow band RGBs are reflected by the object... Worst case is it looks like a different color than it would be in sunlight or broad spectrum white.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday August 18 2022, @09:31PM (1 child)
The street lights they are installing around me when the old hazy pink/white halogens expire are so white and so bright that they wash out everything around them, and cause huge amounts of light to reflect from the road, footpaths, parked cars..
While LEDs can be better than halogen lights or arc lights used in foggy areas... but they have to be the correct lights - not just the cheapest or whitest or brightest.
For some reason, authorities seem to think that, if you can't read a book under a street light, it isn't bright enough.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Friday August 19 2022, @04:43AM
We used to have a HPS light in the street with a corner reflector to direct the light up the street surface. Someone decided that HPS was evil and replaced it with blueish LEDs and no corner reflector so most of the light goes into people's bedrooms (literally!) and the sky. Also since they got an absolute bargain and used the cheapest Chinese LEDs they could find on Aliexpress or possibly Wish, the unit has failed and been replaced three times already so far.
I'm sure someone got a nice bonus for implementing cheap green LED street lighting.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @09:42PM
It won't be long before SpaceX makes it affordable to put all the observatories in space. Not only will that solve the "light pollution" problem, it will solve the much greater problems of the Earth blocking half of the sky, and the Sun ruining observations for on average half of every day, not to mention natural issues like clouds.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 18 2022, @10:03PM (1 child)
I didn't understand light pollution until I did a month's rotation at NTC. With a new moon the sky was just amazing.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by crm114 on Friday August 19 2022, @02:00AM
When I was a kid, we came home one night, and it was a new moon.
My dad had us just stand outside for a couple minutes, and then told us to look down. We could see our shadows from only star light. A life changing moment.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Friday August 19 2022, @12:24AM (3 children)
I have tried to move away from light pollution my whole life. It seems to follow me.
When I moved into my new house, 25 years ago, I would sit outside and watch meteorites. I would see 10's to 100's a night. Now, I can't see a single one.
Big box stores and developments have been built around me. Each require the lights to keep the parking lots lit all night, so that no one parks a car there in what used to be an empty field with coyotes. The "safe" places 20 years ago are now neighborhoods where all these "bright college educated people" are so afraid, they keep lights on at all times.
All I've seen is that you can't educate people on science, and people that read science to educate, are missing the point. But of course on the other side, try to get one of these people out of their house to stare at the stars....
I'm going to go cry now.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 19 2022, @01:54AM
Bro, I am so much with you. Light pollution is the worse kind simply because it's here now. There are no dark places any more and I love them so much. I drove through the whole country in search of a dark place and I could not find one. It's really sad.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Friday August 19 2022, @04:51AM (1 child)
And it actually has the opposite effect of the one intended. By brightly lighting it they've inviting people to be there, and if questioned they can say they lost their keys or cellphone and were just wandering around looking for it. If there's no light they'll have to bring their own, and nothing attracts attention more than a torch flashing around in an otherwise unlit area.
Same with any number of other situations, e.g. office buildings that are lit on every floor. Put on overalls and carry a backpack vacuum and you can wander from floor to floor looting whatever you like. Flash a torch around an otherwise dark building and you're telling everyone in visual range where the burglar is.
Our house has no permanent or automatic outside lighting. If an intruder comes close they'll either break a leg on our steep property or alert half the street to their presence by having to provide plenty of illumination to see where they're going.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2022, @06:29AM
Dark security gang represent! My neighbor has motion sensors which are better than the always on lights that some people have, but my place doesn't even have that. My neighbor's obnoxious always-on is usually enough to guide me in, but on those rare occasions when he doesn't turn it on, all I have to do is shine the cel-phone on the keyhole. All that lighting is just a huge waste.
The thing that really gets me is the "privacy fencing" and gates. I don't have that stupid shit either. There are half a dozen neighbors that can see my front door, and they can see most of my side yards too. That's good! Anybody prowling around my house is going to be seen by everybody. I have no interest in nude sunbathing, and you probably don't either so what's the fence for? You got a dog? Chain link or a low picket will keep them in check just fine and people can still see if you're being robbed.