July 2025: Identity, Light Pollution News.

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This Episode:

How should we be framing night preservation issues? What on earth is airglow? And what do you need to take photos of fireflies?

This episode, I welcome back Jeff Calta of the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival and Tom Reinert of Dark Sky International. And I also welcome Babak Tafreshi to the show!

Settle in, you’re about to get some helpful tips to improve your nighttime photography!

Host:

Guests:

Light Pollution News: July Highlights

Public Safety

• Personal Security Drone Concept: A new idea proposes personal security drones to escort individuals, especially women, through dimly lit streets at night, enhancing safety during commutes near coffee shops or train stations.
• Streetlight Upgrades in Major US Cities:
  • Atlanta, Georgia is nearing completion of its “Light Up the Night” campaign, replacing and adding 30,000 LED streetlights. City leaders expect this initiative to reduce crime by up to 20%, though concerns remain about the harshness and direction of the lighting.
  • Flint, Michigan is targeting high-crime areas with an influx of new streetlights, a trend described as the “weaponization” of lighting to deter crime. Similar strategies are seen in Philadelphia, where excessive bright lighting often causes visual discomfort and temporary blindness for passersby.
  • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is taking a different approach, launching a streetlight retrofit campaign with 2200K color temperature lights, thanks to advocacy from Dark Sky Pittsburgh. This initiative aims to reduce light pollution and preserve the night sky.
• Debate on Lighting and Safety: An NPR article questions whether more lighting truly makes people safer. Harsh lighting can reduce sensory acuity and adaptation to darkness, sometimes making it harder to respond to threats.

Health Impacts of Light Pollution. 

A study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology links environmental light pollution to a 7% increase in stroke hospitalizations and a 15% rise in irregular heartbeat hospitalizations, even after considering factors like air pollution and socioeconomic status.

Night Sky Photography and Phenomena:

• Airglow and Noctilucent Clouds: Photographers are capturing rare night sky events such as airglow and noctilucent clouds, with stunning images featured in the 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year awards.
• Double Milky Way: Unique moments like capturing both the Winter and Summer Milky Way in a single frame highlight the beauty and majesty of the night sky.

• Power Blackout in Spain: During a major blackout, residents of Montilla, Spain, enjoyed increased socialization and night sky photography, with images of the Milky Way over a living city capturing global attention.

Dark Sky Initiatives:

• Beara Peninsula, Ireland aims to join Kerry and Mayo as a designated Dark Sky area, preserving natural night environments.
• Adirondack Sky Center, NY is working to establish New York’s first Dark Sky designated area, while efforts continue to protect a vast 42,000 sq km region between Kingston and Ottawa as a Dark Sky Preserve, involving 75 towns and over 500,000 residents.

Eco-Friendly Port Lighting in Brazil.

Ferroport, a Brazilian port, replaced disruptive LED lights with high-quality, low-light video cameras to protect local endangered species like maned wolves and anteaters. Additional efforts include planting over 66,000 trees and safeguarding sea turtle hatchlings, setting a sustainability example for other ports.

Light Pollution News: July Read Along

How about this, as we start this week’s show, I wanted to share this concept that I stumbled across when pulling everything together. It’s for a personal security drone designed to escort, presumably women, around late at night to navigate “a dimly lit street after work near their favorite coffee shop or walking home from the nearest train station.”

The concept isn’t all that different from a story that we had some months ago, whereby through the use of surveillance, a UK town implemented a safety escort system for young ladies leaving bars, presumably under the influence. In this case, the drone would be docked at a streetlight.

Well, the news on streetlights this go round spanned the gamut. First, Atlanta, Georgia, is close to wrapping up its four year project to switch and add 30,000 LED fixtures to the streets in its ‘Light Up the Night’ campaign. City leaders anticipate the lights will eradicate up to 20% of crime. I was not able to identify the color of the lights, but from all of the photos I’ve seen, these look to be 4000K, and I don’t think dimming or shielding any of them is part of the equation.

Next, over in Flint, MI, city leaders are jumping on the weaponization of lighting bandwagon – rolling out a plan to “target highest crime areas with flood of new street lights.” If you at home are not aware of what I mean by weaponizing, yes, in a way it’s a slight bit of hyperbole on my part – but it also, I think, fairly describes what is being attempted. Here in Philadelphia, as many of you know from the recent study, we weaponize light in many areas of the city, and it’s not just the city itself that is sanctioning light as a weapon to fight crime. It’s also private businesses, apartments, and strip malls.

When you drive by these areas, and I wish I was exaggerating, the light itself, driven by a combination of the ludicrously bright fixtures and the overabundance of such fixtures, actually bleaches everything in a harsh white. It’s so bright that you will get temporary blindness akin to sunspots if you look directly at the fixture. On top of that, they are typically aimed outward, not downward, so the chances of you glancing at them are pretty high.

Finally, here in my home state, the fine folks of Pittsburgh have officially kicked off a streetlighting retrofit campaign, though this one may look quite a bit different from Atlanta’s ‘Light Up the Night,’ and from Philadelphia and Flint’s sanctioned weaponized lighting campaigns. Instead, thanks to the diligent and hard work of a group of Dark Sky Pittsburgh advocates, including past guest Diane Turnshek and Stephen Quick, the lighting will be using 2200K color temperature lights. The Steel City has a website where you can track their progress.

We’ll close out this streetlight segment with this NPR article, ‘Do Lights Really Make People Safer?’ that features past guest Stephen Hummel. I thought this was interesting, host Dean Regas, whom Babak, I believe you’ve interviewed with, recounts a job he took earlier in life as a security guard – recounting how initially he was the kind of guy to turn on all the lights in buildings he passed through, then he began to realize that he had better sensory acuity when the lights were off.

And, personally, as an amateur astronomer who’s right at home in darkness, I can kinda relate to what he says next. Truthfully, it’s always been why I’m personally opposed to bright, harsh lighting – that is, it creates situations where your eyes cannot quickly adapt to the environment should something arise.

Regas says, “Now, there were only a few times where I had to like distantly confront people and I used the darkness to my advantage quite a bit. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me [he’s talking about the shadow of a street light]. So, when people were, you know, like places they weren’t supposed to be, I would yell out, “Hey, what are you doing? Get outta here right now!”

… every time the other people would yell, oh, shoot. … Darkness was my superpower.”

We have one quick health related article in this episode. From the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers collected about half a million hospitalization cases over the span of eight years from 2012 through 2020 and looked at how generalized, environmental light pollution correlated with heart attacks, irregular heartbeats, and strokes. They found a 7% higher chance of stroke hospitalization and a 15% chance of irregular heartbeat hospitalization in such environments. Other factors considered were air pollution, weather, and wealth.

How about this! Per Ars Technica, If a doctor tells you that your brain scan is a “starry sky,” you better be concerned! Doctors diagnosed a man in South Korea with a hard to diagnose condition called CNS tuberculoma. The condition, which is thought to be driven by a bacterium related to tuberculosis, spreads into the brain and creates circular lesions. The good news is that the man was treated with antibiotics and made a full recovery.

Moving over to a much more fun topic, let’s talk photography!

A month ago, a man named Aaron Watson captured something that most people probably wouldn’t even know exists…airglow. His 30 minute timelapse video shows rippling darkness in a field of green with the Milky Way cutting through the center. Apparently, the show was visible to the naked eye, which is usually the case for this type of airglow, called nightglow. It occurs at night as sun deposited oxygen molecules recombine and release a green glow.

Now we have a buy one get one from Space.com, I don’t plan that – stuff just works out that way sometimes. This is another super cool piece of night sky photography phenomena that we don’t typically see. Perhaps that’s because you need to be situated pretty high on the latitude scale, think North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan, for our friends from the Actual Astronomy Podcast.

Noctilucent clouds sit up high high in the atmosphere, around 50 miles above our surface in a layer called the mesosphere. What happens is that the rays of the endless sun in extreme northern latitudes stretch out past twilight, illuminating frozen dust in a patchwork pattern.

The 2025 Milky Way Photographer of the Year awards came out via Capture the Atlas. As an amateur photographer, out of all of the things I take pictures of, I can honestly say that there’s never anything quite as majestic and emotion evoking as capturing our night sky’s full majesty.

Among the finalists included, Babak, your friend, Don Pettit, who took an absolutely incredible photo from space, capturing the Earth glowing at night with an arching Milky Way fading into the sunrise. Others on here showcase a myriad of composition related images.

Also included in this collection is something that I’ve been lucky enough to experience once in my life, last year, when we were at Big Bend around the eclipse – the double Milky Way. That is the Winter Milky Way and the Summer Milky Way, captured in the same frame. Now, if you were to experience this in real time, you’d see them 10 hours or so apart after sunset and before dawn.

As we close out today’s show, did any of you see the news a little while back? There was a massive power blackout in Spain back on April 28^th. And, as luck would have it, in our constant surveillance state world, three NASA satellites took some shots of Spain as it experienced blackouts. Researchers compiled the data of the Sumoi-NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites to create a motion gif of the land-based effects.

And just how were the mild mannered people of Spain during this experience? Well, they were forcefully detached from technology for a bit. And with it came, shocker, increased socialization, dancing, ping pong, chess matches, sing alongs…and even some Milky Way photography!

Chema Marmol, utilizing the sky photography planning phone app, Photopills, busted out his camera gear and took a shot of the Milky Way flowing over his town, Montilla. The photos are spectacular, and possibly haunting. The best of which is that these photos were taken of a living city, not, say, an abandoned barn or church.

Before we go, I like to end shows on a good note.

The Beara Peninsula in Ireland is looking to join two other Irish Dark Sky areas, those being Kerry International Dark Sky Reserve and the Mayo Dark Sky Park.

The region housing some of the most unforgiving mountains on the East Coast is attempting to get a Dark Sky designation. Per WAMC Public Radio, the Adirondack Sky Center and Observatory has a lot of work to do, but is slowly working with community groups to help obtain a designation, which, correct me if I’m wrong, Tom, I believe would be New York State’s first designated area.

And two men are working very hard to protect nighttimes in a 42,000 square kilometer zone between Kingston and Ottawa into a Dark Sky Preserve. The process will involve working with an ambitious 75 towns and over .5M residents.

Finally, tonight, how about this! A Brazilian port has decided to ditch super bright LED lights! The lights apparently disrupted local endangered species, including maned wolves, anteaters, and more. Ferroport instead opted for an array of high quality, low light video cameras to provide government mandated 24/7 monitoring.

Apparently, the video quality is “crystal clear” in the dark. Other environmentally friendly activities that Ferroport has undertaken include planting upwards of 66k trees and also working to actively protect sea turtle hatchlings. Maybe Ferroport can set the stage for future companies to follow.

How about that!