SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Bring on the night, say National Park visitors in new study
Natural wonders like tumbling waterfalls, jutting rock faces and banks of wildflowers have long drawn visitors to America's national parks and inspired efforts to protect their beauty.
According to a study published Sept. 4 in Park Science, visitors also value and seek to protect a different kind of threatened natural resource in the parks: dark nighttime skies.
Almost 90 percent of visitors to Maine's Acadia National Park interviewed for the study agreed or strongly agreed with the statements, "Viewing the night sky is important to me" and "The National Park Service should work to protect the ability of visitors to see the night sky."
Acadia National Park will hold its annual Night Skies Festival Sept. 10 through 14 this year.
According to the study, led by Robert Manning of the University of Vermont, 99 percent of the world's skies suffer from light pollution and two-thirds of Americans can't see the Milky Way from their homes.
Most light threatening the National Parks comes from development, the study says. Light from cities or towns can reach parks from as far away as 250 miles.
"It's a typical story," Manning says. "We begin to value things as they disappear. Fortunately, darkness in a renewable resource and we can we can do things to restore it in the parks."
In addition to gauging the value to park visitors of a dark nighttime sky, the study also provides data to park managers at Acadia - and by extension, other parks - enabling them to develop visitor-driven plans for setting light pollution targets.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Monday September 07 2015, @04:22AM
You know what the Milky Way looks like? A band of light from hundreds of millions of stars too small and faint to make out individually?
When there's no light pollution and no clouds and no moon...that's what the entire sky looks like. If the Milky Way is up, it's even brighter. The zodiacal light is pretty bright, too -- a beacon pointing to where the Sun disappeared over the horizon long after the last rays of the Sun in the atmosphere have been fully shadowed by the Earth. It's the Sun lighting up the dust in the plane of the Solar System -- essentially, you're looking at the Asteroid Belt.
If it's dark you're looking for...you'll have to look down, not up. One of the most frightening sights I've ever seen...I was at the rim of the Grand Canyon photographing a very minor comet that was chasing a crescent moon. I stayed until full dark to admire the sky and to play around with some constellation photos. When I finally packed it in for the night and turned on my headlamp to pack up my stuff and drag it to the car, I shined the (very bright) light over the edge of the Canyon rim a few feet away...and saw nothing. Pure blackness. (For obvious reasons -- the ground below was literally miles away, and mostly shadowed even by what feeble starlight there was.) Scared the shit out of me on a very, very primal level.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 07 2015, @09:22AM
It is a lot of fun to go deep into a cave and then turn the lights out. I know friends who have had total light failures while km underground and had to crawl/feel their way out.
(Score: 1) by Walzmyn on Monday September 07 2015, @10:28AM
Oh yes. That same lake Powell trip I referenced above began with a night's stay at the Grand Canyon. We arrived well past dark but I walked out to the little knee wall they had at the edge of the rim. It was spooky as hell. There was some light back at the hotel a good ways behind me, then over this wall was just black. The ground could have been an inch away or miles there was no way to know, nothing to see. It actually gave me a lot more of that stomach dropping feeling than the next morning when I looked over that cliff and saw just how far down the first bounce would be.