I have cared about the problem of light pollution since hearing about it as a teen almost 40 years ago. Despite being a regular advocate for dark skies in casual conversation, politics such as LED street lamp replacement, business decisions such as replacing low pressures sodium vapour floods in the company parking lot I have come to the conclusion that most people just don't care or don't get why it matters. I've heard responses like "so close your curtains" or "it is safer with more light" or "the lights aren't that bright".
You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity? The huge amount of light bleed serves no functional purpose. Lights, lights everywhere lights. Lighting up nothing. You can buy an intensely bright fixture at Home Depot and just mount it up making any location bright as day, but 24 hours a day. LEDs may have actually made things worse because of their low cost per lumen and long operating lives that encourages more and brighter lighting.
I am out of step in wanting a world with less human noise and light. If I complain about how noisy I find the bay area and how I would love to punch the Harley rider who lives a block away in the throat the most common answer I get is 'Wow, India and China are way louder' like that should make me feel better or unjustified in my complaint. In truth all it does is make me want to avoid visiting those places.
White LEDs (including at least anything with correlated color temperature > 2500K) should never be used outdoors at night for any purpose other than momentary artistic displays. (And indoors should be mostly reserved for daytime use.)
They are awful for street lamps, porch lamps, car headlamps, flashlights, bike lights, camp lanterns, ...
People don’t seem to understand that adding massive glare in your peripheral vision and clobbering your night vision makes it harder to see everything, and makes everything less safe. (Not to mention screws up your sleep, prevents you from seeing the stars, is terribly damaging to nearby animals, ...) Street lighting (including from car headlamps) is safest and most effective when it is dim but even (human eyes are amazing at adapting to low overall light levels, given sufficient time) and not very blue, rather than bright and extremely patchy.
If people want to use LEDs, they should be dim, orange, diffuse, as low to the ground as practical, and directed primarily downward. The purported advantage LEDs have in longer lifespan and lower power use can conceivably make them better for street lamps if the lamps are made dimmer, more numerous, spaced closer together, brought lower down, and shielded better from the top and side. But if they are going to be put higher up, made intensely blue and extremely bright, then they end up not having any energy saving and making conditions worse for everyone, including drivers, pedestrians, people whose windows look out on the street, ...
The lighting vendors selling these over-blue over-bright lamps to cities and the public are doing the world a gross disservice.
Even bicycle headlights are now getting so bright that I find them to be painful [1]. Unlike cars, their placement isn't regulated at all, and many cyclists seem to think that pointing them slightly upwards is a good thing. Or worse, they'll wear helmet headlights which are pretty much at eye level.
[1] I'm a bit more sensitive to light than most people, I get migraines and have low grade photophobia 24/7.
I believe the U.N? had to update their guidance for this reason. Iirc, the max allowed brightness was either calculated incorrectly, or was just set too high.
When I walk around my town at midnight, I often stand and notice how the lights just reveal empty space everywhere. Nobody is around. Nobody is even using the all that light! Driving at night would be dangerous without light of course, but that's why they have headlights. Those lights are burning all night long and they're not even doing anything.
People seem to abhor silence and emptiness. They hate it, or maybe they're afraid of it. They always want to fill it with something.
I love to walk around in the middle of the night because the car traffic around here virtually stops and silence and some degree of darkness returns. The busyness goes away. I'm always amazed that I rarely see anyone else out at night. Don't others crave emptiness too?
> You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity?
And also to disorient nocturnal migrating insects (with flow on effects down the eco system) while they signal to elites overhead how eco conscious they are by using recyclable packaging in the complimentary in-flight magazine.
Pretty much this. Humans tend to want to feel important and recognized, and what better way to feel big than to outdo the stars in the sky? When there's no more stars to outdo, all we can do is compete with each other.
This is one issue that breaks my heart more than almost any other. I never saw a truly dark sky or the milky way until I was in my early 30s. Now I take regular road trips out west to experience it.
People are so oblivious to light pollution. They don't realize how absurdly bright our lights are and how little they're actually needed. At minimum, they shouldn't be lighting the undersides of airplanes.
I didn't know what else I could do about this, so I inserted a light pollution level in my indie game. You have to replace these hideously bright outdoor lamps with full cutoff fixtures to gradually get the stars back. I wish there was more I could do.
The problem has to be educational. If the public valued the night sky, they would be amenable to fixing it. But how do you accomplish that if you're not any good at marketing or communicating?
also "LED" fixtures may not be the answer. The astrophotography community has software to remove both high and low pressure sodium lights' color frequency. LEDs can be in several different frequency bands, and makes them harder or impossible to remove, even if there is less overall "light pollution" from them.
I live in a purple area (one step brighter than black - none or close to none) on the pollution maps and even so, when a nearby city switched to LEDs for the "main drag" it made the city lights really apparent even further out than before, about 7 miles further out, due to the high humidity and other local effects.
However i do think that something needs to be done, i lived in a suburb of Los Angeles growing up (quite far though) and i remember being able to see the milky way during the summer when i was allowed to stay up later than usual or play outside later than usual. In my teens and early 20s though, we had to drive to angeles national forest mountain roads to be able to see the milky way.
There's much less air traffic at night, and what traffic there is, is probably on an IFR flight plan.
But lighting would only really help VFR pilots if it was coming from above and they were looking down. Looking out and up from a small airplane cockpit to avoid traffic is really impractical. You're better off relying on ADS-B.
I feel like the damage done by the underside lights on airplanes is minimal at best, especially since planes, you know, move out of the way relatively quickly. The damage done by removing them can be tremendous.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. I was referring to the illumination of aircraft by lights on Earth, not lights on the aircraft itself. The light coming from Earth is wasted.
This isn't really an answer to your question, but I feel like a big part of the problem is that people don't know what they're missing. Even though I've tried to find dark places to see the stars, I have never in my life seen the night sky without light pollution.
I've thought about it a lot and there probably isn't the political will to start something like this, but I think there should be, on the last new moon in August (any day would work, but it has to be the dark and clear), a national night sky holiday, where everyone turns off the lights for an hour after midnight, so we can all get a chance to really see the stars. (Turning off the the power for an hour would be even better, but that might cause problems with the power grid.)
I spent several weeks in NW Australia, in desert areas. At this time it was considered one of the darkest places on Earth.
I can honestly say the stars were the most incredible thing imaginable. I slept in a swag, under the stars for many weeks. I’d wake up sometimes at about 2am for an hour or so as I’d go to bed so early because we had very little artificial lighting.
One particular night I remember the whole sky looked purple and white with stars, I could see so many objects moving, satellites and who knows what else, the sky looked alive.
I remember thinning how lucky I was to see it, I also remember thinking “why would anyone watch TV if they could see this instead ?”.
It really put things in perspective for me and made me realise the earth is an incredible spaceship, maybe the best one we will ever have!
Australia used to have this thing called “earth hour” where they encouraged you to turn off your lights for an hour. Not sure if it was officially scrapped or if no one cared anymore after lights become extremely efficient.
I might soon be forced to move closer to an urban area. One of the things I’ll miss most is being able to see the Milky Way on every clear night. Gazing across thousands of light years at the neighboring arm of our galaxy will never cease to amaze me.
Light pollution is the pollution I care about most. I remember as a childhood the sense of wonder and inspiraiton I got from looking up at the milky way; I had no idea until I was older that many people didn't even know it was possible to see it with the naked eye.
If you also care about dark skies you might be interested in dark sky preserves¹ and the IDA².
It's a different problem altogether IMO. Wasted light is a design, political or education problem. Heat waste is often an engineering problem that we still haven't been able to solve.
Yes, it mostly is a different problem. My point is that with regard to energy wastage we have hugely more important issues than unnecessary light output. And the switch from incandescent light bulbs to LED has already reduced the energy wastage from lighting. I'm all in favor of reducing light pollution, but not because of energy concerns.
Unfortunately leds have made light pollution worse.
Instead of pocketing the difference in greater photon production efficiency the trend has been to just make things brighter.(where they really don't need to be)
Not to mention, not just lighting use, but lighting design needs a complete rethink in the age of leds. Much nighttime lighting, public and private used to cast a nice, pleasant glow, now very often led nighttime lighting is far too bright, and produced in wavelengths that can be quite unpleasant on the eyes, and registers as cold, sterile, and unnatural.
The problem of light pollution is not solely about energy wastefulness. Light pollution disrupts natural rhythms and ecosystems. The blotting out of the night sky is a great loss for the human soul and human experience.
> Unfortunately leds have made light pollution worse.
They also do an end run around the legal efforts to contain or limit light pollution.
In my state, we have the Dark Skies Act which tries to limit the amount of light pollution in certain areas, but it largely hasn't been updated for the use of LEDs. Some counties now define light output based on lumens, but the law AFAIK still references wattage limits. So, new lights that, under the intent of the law, are too bright and require shielding can probably skirt around it (IANAL).
But, almost no one knows about it, so enforcement is spotty at best.
(I'm slightly annoyed presently, because some new neighbors installed a floodlight that's pointed directly at my bedroom from across the valley and it doesn't appear to be doing anything useful. Stargazing and amateur astronomy is going to suck this summer.)
When it comes to bright outdoor lights, high fences make good neighbors. I have a neighbor that leaves their wide angle floodlights on all night in the backyard, some of which are directly pointed towards our shared fence. That is less of a problem now that I have a block wall that may(not) be just a bit too tall for local code but makes my backyard very dark.
That is mainly a choice of the installer, you can get LED lighting in 2700K. It's a regulation update to insist outdoor night time public lighting be 2700K or lower.
The sweet spot for lumens per watt is about 5000K I think, so there is also a power efficiency angle which is probably why a lot of these new lights are way too blue.
> Instead of pocketing the difference in greater photon production efficiency the trend has been to just make things brighter.(where they really don't need to be)
Are you saying that people are replacing, say, 100W bulbs with LEDs consuming 100W? I find that hard to believe, given that LEDs emit the same amount of light at approximately 1/10 the wattage. That would mean we're replacing 100W of incandescent bulbs with 1000W equivalent of LEDs? Or, is this versus fluorescent, which would be more of a 1.5-2:1 wattage equivalent exchange rate?
As for LEDs being "cold, sterile, and unnatural," that seems to be primarily a property of older LED bulbs. Newer bulbs are perfectly capable of emitting light at virtually any color temperature between 3000-6500K, which encompasses everything from "soft white" to daylight. Personally, I prefer daylight balanced bulbs, because I do some color sensitive work, and those bulbs have the highest available CRI of any non-incandescent bulb, but many people do prefer the "soft white" style. Even for non-color sensitive work, I find them too yellow for my liking, but I get that this is all down to personal preference.
Sodium vapor lights were the common lighting mode through the early 2000s and have a soft warm orange glow that was somewhat soothing.
The new LED street / parking lot lights are high color temperature 'daylight' style stadium lights, and have not had improved diffusers or reductions in effective lumen output. Many who don't have to spend time near these lights see it as an anti-crime benefit and ignore all other social costs.
Heat production is a necessary component of all energy transformations. Nothing is 100% efficient in this regard as you know.
But light pollution, while producing waste heat, is also just unnecessary in general.
We don't need to keep office buildings lit all night, we don't need to have cities lit up all night like sports fields.
Night time lighting should be on a targeted and as needed basis.
It is unbelievable what you can see. 20 years ago I was on a small island in the gulf of thailand, 30 km away from shore, and with the great thing that all electricity on that island was generated by engines which were switched off at 10pm. The sky was full of stars.
I think it's fair to care about it for precisely the reason that you don't get it. This problem doesn't get as much attention, and is more likely to get worse because of sentiment like this :(
Yes, it doesn't seem to be urgent or important a concern. But, that's based on our limited observations. Hopefully, that turns out to be true, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are more unknown and domino effects that causes light pollution to be just as or nearly as deadly in the long term.
Why would it be the one that you care the most about? Air pollution gives you cancer and breathing difficulties, noise pollution causes stress and hearing damage, soil and water pollution poison you and the environment.
In contrast light pollution deprives you of a good view and messes up some nocturnal animals. Sure, it’s not great, but compared to other forms of pollution it’s almost a non issue.
The only long-term solution is to convince your acquaintances to have at most one kid, or to make sure your kids join a space-faring company ;)
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
... or in other words: the most relevant component in the light pollution factor is the exponential factor of human reproduction.
I moved 2 years ago to a small village in New Mexico. It's not technically a dark sky site (we get some light to the north from Santa Fe), but most nights I sit outside (hot tub) and stare up at the vast expanse. Of course, it never looks like the long exposure shots, so that mythical milky way isn't part of the view at all.
Nevertheless, I've already noticed how much more I think about things related to what it is in the night sky. The slow movement of Orion. The so-far constant relationship between Aldebaran and the Pleiades. Learning (some) of the names of the most prominent stars. Being reminded month after month of how the lunar cycle changes the experience of the night sky, even on a day to day basis because of approx 1 hr shift in "when the moon is in the same spot".
I've spent plenty of time below dark skies, but have lived in cities more or less my entire (57 year) life. It's only been very recently that I've really started to have some sense of what is gained when one has the an experience of the night sky that is more like what our ancestors would have experienced: how it shapes one's sense of where we are in space and time, of how much vaster things are than our small lives (I say this even living in the American west, which encourages this experience all by itself), and of relationships in the sky that we can see but not really understand (without science and very complex and vast equipment).
"that mythical milky way isn't part of the view at all."
Light pollution!
I see it from here. Look me up on a map: Waitati, Otago, Aotearoa.
The milky way is spray painted across the sky. I wonder what you mean? Is the light pollution in the cities far from you bad enough to obliterate that?
In a 200 mile radius of me there are probably not half a million people, concentrated in one direction, and a city of 120,000 fifteen miles away across a thousand foot high mountain. Seems odd to me I can see it and you cannot. Is it more visible in the Southern Hemisphere?
I go out most ever night. If it is clear I look at the stars, usually one, at random.
I doubt this can be seen anywhere in the world. They are using long exposure (and probably post processing) for a reason.
You are probably seeing a decent sky. Did you try observing after strong rain or winds? Do you have any light nearby? For perfect viewing you need clear sky after rain with no moon and far from any source of light.
I see it clearly, and I'm only 10km from Palmerston North which puts out a lot of light.
I've seen it from remote ocean, and more remote parts of NZ, and it never looks like those colorful long exposure photographs. Instead it barely has any color, but certainly has billows of tiny black clouds obscuring uncountable infinitely close stars that look like milk.
Based on the light levels we see 20 miles south of you, coming from SF, I wouldn't be surprised if you can't really see the Milky Way much. Come on down to the Galisteo Basin Preserve some night and see how it looks from there. Or, since I'm guessing you're at LANL, maybe just stay at the lab late one night :)
Seeing the Milky Way at night is incredible, but what a lot of people don't realize is that there is a whole lot more than the Milky Way up there in "plain sight" and huge, just too dim to see with the naked eye. Many people don't realize for example that the Andromeda galaxy is visually about 6 times the size of the full moon, but just too dim to see. Some of the nebulae I photograph are actually barely visible with the naked eye if you go to a truly dark enough place (e.g. Death Valley).
A big part of what I'm trying to do through photography is to inspire more people to be interested in space, STEM, and also protect the beautiful views that have been bestowed to us by the universe. It's something that I'm quite privileged to have easy access to in California but did not when I was growing up in Asia and later on the east coast of the US.
By the way, although although a lot of people have been pointing fingers at StarLink, including a huge swath of the amateur astronomy community, it's not actually a huge problem for most photography and observations. StarLink satellites are easily filtered out using even the most basic outlier rejection techniques (e.g. sigma clipping) and their tracks are presumably predictable and known in advance. They are much less of a problem in my experience than planes and assholes with car headlights who deliberately stop by your observing site for extended periods of time. I can't comment if there are any research projects affected by them but I imagine that at most they are an annoyance to data filtering and not dealbreaker.
I was thinking last week about creating a web app to teach light pollution. And a bit of brightness in astrophotography more generally.
Context is I'd like to sketch a primary-school "atoms up" learning progression, but emphasizing nuclei. Nucleosynthesis then pulls in deep time, galaxy, and stars. But many kids, and many teachers, have never seen a sky of stars. So how might stars, largely unseen, be tied to their everyday lives?
I saw this graphic[1] go by. But it's physically unrealistic - even faint stars in darkest "1" are shown brighter than the sky in polluted "9". So how might it be done better?
Perhaps as an interactive. A slider for sky illuminance. Another for exposure (pupil dilation, etc). IIRC, retina dynamic range is similar to a screen's. Conceptual buttons, like day/twilight/night, moon and phase, urban to sea, altitude, clouds, etc. These all next to a similar sky graphic, with room left over for secondary material. So one might explore the space from cloudy day, to nights with eye and instruments, to above atmosphere, Hubble, and beyond inner-system dust scattering.
With some potential for fun stories. Like once above atmosphere, being able to see a sky of stars in the middle of the day, as long as you're not looking towards the Sun, or anything sunlit. And for addressing common misconceptions. Like the moon and stars are only up at night.
I am one who values darkness and researched treks to get such views. I haven't yet made one to see first hand. I had trouble distilling this post down to the level of concern I should have. It was unclear if the currently proposed satellites are still below naked-eye vision which seems okay, though not as much for the astronomical types. Science could carry on with space-based telescopes.
This summs it up for me (being logically moved by intangibles without the wordiness):
> Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize and defend human goods that cannot be objectively measured. And should some effort be made to quantify them, they are likely to be reduced, impoverished, and exploited.
> What do we lose when we lose the stars? What has it cost us to conquer the night? Perhaps only the poet can say.
"Lose" sounds passive, like it just happened. We "lose" our keys.
"Smothered" or "Cast away" might be better terms. Like what we're doing to beaches with plastic. We worked hard to create what blocks out the stars and covers the sands, as well as much of our other connections to once pristine nature. We know when we launch satellites, build smokestacks, drive where we could walk, and choose to fly.
We can fool ourselves that we didn't know, but as Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.", but also "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
I’m not saying that SpaceX themselves asked people outside of the US, but that they did get permission from the FAA which has to make sure any satellite constellations they authorize abide by various international treaties about the use of space.
Also you are moving the goalposts, your original post claimed that SpaceX didn’t ask anyone for permission which is completely false.
There’s a link in the article to Ivan Illich’s “Silence is a commons” that captures a wider point about commons, and paints it with a couple of historical examples.
Why buy advertising on a billboard that gets seen very briefly when the ship goes by when you could instead buy advertising inside the ship where you have a captive audience for weeks on end?
You can recover the "lost stars" with cheap telescopes, some software and good weather.
Urban astronomy is pretty popular nowadays: https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/
Urban astronomy is popular and fun. But no one would pass on dark skies if they could get them. Mostly you don't have better options when you watch bright cities skies.
> The Starlink satellites are clearly not responsible for the loss of the starry sky. That process has been underway for more than two centuries and has been the consequence of what are now much more mundane technologies that we hardly think of at all. But I began to think of the ambitions of the Starlink project as somehow amounting to a final twist of the knife. Perhaps this is a bit too dramatic a metaphor, but if we think that the loss of the star-filled night sky is a real and serious loss with significant if also difficult to quantify human consequences, then the final imposition of an artificial network of satellites where before the old celestial inheritance had been seems rather like being tossed cheap trinkets to compensate for the theft some precious treasure.
What's more important, pretty long exposure pictures taken from Earth or internet access? I say internet access. Space telescopes are the future of real astronomy important data comes from anyway.
I have internet access (I am from and live in Nigeria).
Nobody consulted me (or my country, or any of the countries it's purporting to help) about Starlink. Our input is of course never needed - why would it, when America (both the government and the companies) can simply decide what's good or not good for us instead?
In fairness, this is a deep-rooted bitterness that goes far beyond this one project. The sheer fact that an American company can just up and do things that impact the entire globe on a whim (and worse, the power the American government has to approve/"regulate" such projects as though only their citizens are impacted) is unbelievably absurd to me (see also: Facebook, etc).
Nigeria is a signatory of most space treaties other than the unpopular Moon Treaty. These treaties are in need of updates to reflect the current situation but none of that changes that what is going on now is within the stipulations of the treaties the signatories freely entered into.
The Starlink issue is only relevant to streaks on long exposure pictures. You can't see it with the naked eye. The ship has long sailed on general light pollution near urban centers. Nice if it can be reversed but going to unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how it was in the past is reminiscent of people who cover their furniture in plastic.
going to unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how it was in the past is reminiscent of people who cover their furniture in plastic.
Your comment is reminiscent of ageism.
It's also disingenuous to frame this as a "Starlink" problem. It's a Starlink problem plus the 13 other companies also trying to put 50,000 microsats in orbit, plus the 200 companies that will do it after them when prices come down.
In a couple of decades, we end up with millions of microsats in orbit, and by then there's nothing that can be done.
But as long as we can beam social media misinformation into the most remote corners of the planet, heaven and nature be damned.
"The ship has long sailed on general CO2 emissions from industrial societies. Nice if it can be reversed but going to unreasonable lengths to preserve everything how it was in the past is reminiscent of people who cover their furniture with plastic."
If we lose that essence of humanity where we feel wonder and awe looking up into the night sky, then we lose one of the prime movers of discovery and science. Or do you think cat videos can do the same?
> If we lose that essence of humanity where we feel wonder and awe looking up into the night sky, then we lose one of the prime movers of discovery and science.
Do we? Anecdotally, I grew up in the country and mostly didn't give the night sky a second thought, and yet have always been pretty obsessed with space-related fact and fiction.
Some cultural artifacts continue to exist because the experiences of past generations are passed down through teaching and stories. But if not restrengthened, they die out. Right now, we are zero or one generation away from large swaths of human population having interacted with the full night sky. What happens in two more generations when 99% of humans are able to see only a handful of starts at any given time? That is when you start losing, but at that point it is already too late.
Yes, I believe we do. I only need think of the math discovered solely to predict the stars to know that without the night sky, we are different. To say nothing of the poets.
Seeing satellites fly across the sky also fills me with wonder and awe. A tiny little metal bucket that we sent up there, relaying information, unfathomably far away. It's pretty amazing.
Last summer some time, I was coming down from mushrooms walking home down a road that, when I was a teenager, had been forest.
I became really aware of the streetlights trying to look at the stars going down the road.
You used to be able to see so many stars from that road before street lights or houses were put in. So many stars it was hard to see the space between them.
When I got home, I ended up lying on the grass for a bit in the dark to try and look at some stars the street lights ended a couple of blocks away, so the yard's still relatively dark at night.
Then when I looked up and tried to watch the stars...all I saw were satellites zipping around everywhere.
When I was a kid, seeing a satellite was a fairly rare phenomenon almost as exciting as seeing a meteor. I honestly found the satellites to be more depressing than the light pollution. There wasn't a section of sky that didn't have a satellite in it.
I was still somewhat in that mushroom state of mind, so I got kind of unreasonably sad about it. But it really bothered me. I ended up not wanting to look at the stars and just went to bed.
I do worry about what happens when a dozen other companies want to do the same thing for different purposes and we end up with half a million micro satellites I instead of 42,000.
But the nice thing is these satellites only have lives of a few years and can easily be deorbited.
Makes me very happy to see this author posted here, I do recommend signing up for his regular posts. They are always insightful and beautifully written on highly topical themes.
If there is any benefit of making everything "smart", may it be that one day we can turn off all the lights for 20 minutes and let city dwellers see the stars
You can see the distinctive cool white LED "O" of Apple Park from 20 miles away in a plane. Why? Just vanity? The huge amount of light bleed serves no functional purpose. Lights, lights everywhere lights. Lighting up nothing. You can buy an intensely bright fixture at Home Depot and just mount it up making any location bright as day, but 24 hours a day. LEDs may have actually made things worse because of their low cost per lumen and long operating lives that encourages more and brighter lighting.
I am out of step in wanting a world with less human noise and light. If I complain about how noisy I find the bay area and how I would love to punch the Harley rider who lives a block away in the throat the most common answer I get is 'Wow, India and China are way louder' like that should make me feel better or unjustified in my complaint. In truth all it does is make me want to avoid visiting those places.