For those in the northeastern US, I highly recommend a visit to Mesawisla in Maine, it's a national dark sky park with cabins and an AMC lodge that provides fantastic food.
LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
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Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#92Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can ma…
Dude your country is 98% desolate and unsuited to agriculture. If you want night sky go to a cabin literally anywhere in your unending and cold mountains instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.
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Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#93All the car headlights for new cars in Canada are LED and it makes driving at night painful and dangerous. So many times I’ve been nearby blinded by them and I can’t see anything ahead. And it actually physically causes me pain.
But is that the fault of the LED? That sounds like the fault of whoever calibrated the LEDs' brightness and directionality.
If the beams were the right brightness and pointed downwards, we wouldn't be having this issue.
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#94Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can ma…
>It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. But what if someone were uncomfortable briefly? Did you ever consider that? Technology exists to infantilize us while slowly ruining everything that makes us human. Shame on you for attempting to interrupt human progress.
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Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#95Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can ma…
Check out southwestern Ontario as well. I've driven through there on my way to Michigan a couple times. It's purple at night. The sky is purple.
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#96I think people focus far too much on the temperature of LED street lights and rarely on the CRI. The night will still feel odd and "soulless" even with 2700k LED street lamps so long as they're still the absolute worst CRI.
Dare I argue even I would choose 6500k LED street lights with decent CRI over poor CRI 2700K LED lamps any day.
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#97Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can ma…
I would have assumed that most plants need a daily light/dark cycle but maybe not?
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not just with people who want to walk places, but people who want to mug/murder/rape those that do. As an example, in the UK, councils are expected to light commonly-traveled paths, both so path users can see where they're going, and to reduce crime. Unlit paths in city parks are still traversed, and are often a haven for crime. "Dead of night" isn't the right image. 5PM in winter with clouds (as is ty…
TFA claims that lights don’t reduce crime, but I‘d like to see the exact meaning of that statistic (eg dark places are less frequented hence less crime?).
TFA doesn't even claim that. TFA links to an advocacy website trying to convince authorities to put out less light pollution. It claims improved lighting (presumably brighter) doesn't reduce crime, and it claims a reduction (but not elimination) of lighting doesn't increase crime.
I would say that going from no lighting at all, to some lighting, on urban paths, improves safety (not tripping over unexpected obstacles) and reduces crime (presuming there was any crime while it was unlit). The article doesn't refute that. I would suggest that if a major city decided to eliminate all street lighting, it would be absolute chaos.
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#99Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can ma…
Starlink gets a lot of flax for it but as an avid night sky photographer myself (IG: @dheeranet) who regularly goes to Bortle 1 parts of the world, I haven't found them to be an issue at all.
1. They are only visible when they are spinning up to orbit
2. They are too dim to desensitize your eyes, and are extremely easy to remove with the most basic of outlier rejection techniques; netizens often amplifiy outliers by max-stacking instead of outlier-rejected mean-stacking to make Starlink look much worse than it is
3. Lights from planes have ALWAYS been much, much, much, much worse than satellites. They still aren't particularly a problem for imaging if you know how to outlier reject, and their paths are known, predictable and trackable
I'm not an Elon-fan or anything but just giving a dose of objective reality here.
Not to detract from TFA's real issue which is light pollution from cities -- that's an actual issue as the regions of dark sky are shrinking.
Re: LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't just casually hop up to the Yukon for an evening of astronomy. It's about a thirty hour drive. Even relatively small towns have exurbs now because of our terrible city planning, so light pollution extends shockingly far. Alberta's probably the worst, almost the entire province (about the same land area as Texas) has light pollution. > instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west…
What are you on about? Literally drive north a bit towards Whistler, you can get out of the light pollution in an hour or two lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=8.01&lat=49.6027&lon=-122.7672&state=eyJiYXNlbWFwIjoiTGF5ZXJCaW5nUm9hZCIsIm92ZXJsYXkiOiJzYl8yMDI1Iiwib3ZlcmxheWNvbG9yIjpmYWxzZSwib3ZlcmxheW9wYWNpdHkiOiI2MCIsImZlYXR1cmVzb3BhY2l0eSI6Ijg1In0=
Have you never been there? This light pollution map wildly underestimates light pollution outside of cities. I can tell you from experience you're not getting nearly 22 mpsas skies anywhere near Pemberton.