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Light Pollution Prevents 80% of North Americans From Seeing the Milky Way

posted by n1 on Saturday June 11 2016, @03:32AM   
from the headlights,-white-lines-and-black-tar-rivers dept.

takyon writes:

A new atlas has illustrated that 80% of North Americans are prevented from seeing the Milky Way's bulge by light pollution:

The luminous glow of light pollution prevents nearly 80 percent of people in North America from seeing the Milky Way in the night sky. That's according to a new atlas of artificial night sky brightness that found our home galaxy is now hidden from more than one-third of humanity.

While there are countries were the majority of people still live under pristine, ink-black sky conditions — places such as Chad, Central African Republic and Madagascar — more than 99 percent of the people living in the U.S. and Europe look up and see light-polluted skies.

The country with the worst light-pollution is Singapore, where researchers found that "the entire population lives under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision." Other countries with large percentages of people living under skies this bright include Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377)

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Original Submission

• We have met the enemy and he is us(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2016, @01:59PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2016, @01:59PM (#358308)

  The atlas also projects [sciencemag.org] what would happen if all outdoor lighting in Europe switched from common high-pressure sodium lights to energy efficient 4000-K white light-emitting dioed (LED) lights. LED lights release more light in the blue part of the spectrum than sodium lights. Those blue wavelengths are more easily scattered by Earth’s atmosphere than other colors, which would considerably increase the light pollution they ultimately contribute, bulb for bulb. Blue light is also more easily picked up by the human eye, which means that people would perceive even brighter skies. The atlas team predicts a doubling in worldwide light pollution if they continue to be adopted globally. Falchi says that, considering this, choosing LED lights is akin to stripping an automobile of its emissions control devices to increase engine efficiency. “We are searching only for lighting efficiency, and not paying attention to the quality of the lights that we are installing,” he says.

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