Posted on 10/24/2002 1:11:19 PM PDT by RightWhale
Usually on a good night we can see most of the stars of the Little Dipper. I think that is about 3rd magnitude, the limit. Usually anymore there are about 12-20 stars visible.
If the engineers can make the lights of a city less intrusive on our night skies, I would enjoy that. I really do travel out of the city every year to gaze at the meteor showers.
If they can make us look like Africa without taking away my microwave, I am all for it. ;-)
And my TIVO. Never, never, never. ;)
It is sound to only direct light where you want it to be, if at all possible. Wasting energy needlessly is not conservative... If you are buying a 100 watt bulb, and 40% is leaking towards the sky where you don't need it, does it not make sense to get a better system, and use a less powerful bulb to do a better job? You don't have to eat tofu and wear birkenstocks to see this.
Ah, New Jersey with its perpetually orange night sky. It looks even creepier during a snowstorm when the dense cloud cover reflects all the orange light generated by the cities back down to the ground and off the falling snowflakes. The effect is completely surreal.
I'm with you on this. Our community started regulating lighting 20 years ago. First they wanted the amber lights, then the police found it was more difficult for them to see at night. Then they went to requiring the pink lights. As a result of that our town creates a pink glow for 50 miles instead of a white glow for 50 miles... Now, they've latched on to the shielded directed light idea. They recently required a new car lot (which needs to be well lit to prevent vandalism and theft) to install the latest downward directed lighting - halogens that are shielded for everything except straight down, on short posts. To cover the area with this downward light, there had to be more of them. Consequently, the light downward is so bright it even reflects upward off the pavement not to mention the cars... The glow from this car lot is twice as bright as that from a nearby lot lit with the regulations of 15 years ago.
Basically, government actions always have unintended consequences. Sometimes those are minor (pedestrian nodes that result in people standing even farther out into the street, still off the curb), but sometimes they aren't (the fatherless families that welfare created). The answer is to let the market decide, not to tinker with the regulations. The government is free to play the role of educator, providing information on what it sees as important, but regulating more and more of what we do will have more and more unintended consequences.
Oh, and I heard one of these IDA people on a radio talk show at night a couple years ago. He started out about wanting to see the stars and the natural night sky, but soon launched into sustainability; we use too many resources; live simply so others can simply live; we don't have a right to use all those resources; if we didn't drive cars we wouldn't need all those lights on interchanges, etc. Clearly a far leftist, using "dark skies" as his latest issue to push the same old agenda...
Haven't met that one. Sounds like a poor speaker who can't stay on topic. Sure would sour me on Dark Sky if he were the one presenting before the city council and I were a councilman.
And that is where I have to part ways with them. Like I said, if they want to persuade, that is fine I will even be glad to help. Force is quite another matter and it will end up as forced. I am sure that their intentions are good but I don't really want to go down that road.
a.cricket
I am a member of that group, but lately the group has seemed a little disorganized. Perhaps it is being infiltrated due to early success. I will leave the group if the greenie component gets too strong. Don't need that.
In the 19th century, it was considered a sign of a good economy when the lights were on at noon in Pittsburgh. The reason for this is that the sun would be blotted out by the coal smoke from the steel mills. But as valid as that observation unarguably was, it doesn't mean that an opaque atmosphere is in itself a desirable thing.
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