Join our mailing list. Follow us at LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, & Tiktok.

November 2024: Looking Up Matters. Light Pollution News.

Host:

Guests:

[Editorial Correction: AST sent up the Blue Bird satellites incorrectly noted on show as Blue Walker satellites]

Article List:

Let’s look to the stars to kick things off tonight with some comet talk! I actually did not catch this, but I feel like all three of you probably have. Kevin, I know you have!

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan [ZOO-CHIN-SHAN] -Atlas graced our evening sky this October. In case you’re wondering, Tsuchinshan translates to ‘Purple Mountain’ indicating the observatory in China where it was jointly discovered, and Atlas is the corresponding observatory in South Africa where it was also discovered.

Now you needed really good horizons to catch this 2^nd-3rd magnitude object. If you’re not sure what that means, we’ll dive deeper into that in a little while.

Since we’re talking about astronomy and photography, what do you guys think about this one? In DIY Photography, ‘5 Things You can Photograph from a Light-Polluted City,’ the author suggests a number of interesting ideas, but these two I thought were quite creative – such as shooting transits (that’s when two notable celestial objects cross each other), conjunctions of bright objects (when two notable objects are close to each other).

Before we bolt from this topic – Did any of you happen to see the pictures from NOAA after Hurricane Helene wrought devastation on the southeast? Take a look at this!

In the pre-hurricane photos, you see that familiar patchwork of artificial lighting, but post-storm, it’s almost as if someone took a Photoshop eraser and plucked a path from southern Georgia up to Western North Carolina. 

Well, one thing that we all thought would be reliable during big storms was having a cell phone connection. And in the case of North Carolina, that assumption definitely fell through.

Well potentially good news for hurricane victims, not sure about the rest of us!

Cell phone service may forever be changed! Last month, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched the new AST Spacemobile satellites named the BlueBirds.  If you’ll recall that way back in September of 2022, the first test BlueWalker satellite was launched – bringing awe and fear from land based astronomers when the unfurled satellite held a brightness magnitude of 3.5, then once unraveled, it shot up to a .4 magnitude (making it 100 times brighter).

For you at home who may not be aware of the astronomical measurement of a magnitude, it’s the brightness of sky objects. The measure is a bit counterintuitive as it’s a logarithmic scale – not a linear one, so brightness increases/decreases at a greater rate than simply one increment. Think akin to a dimmer switch.

The other piece about magnitude is that the scale runs a bit like a golf game. Negative magnitudes are very bright while high number positive magnitudes are very dim. So in this case, in October of 2023, when the initial BlueWalker unfurled, it had a magnitude close to 0, whereas most Starlink trains that you may have seen sit somewhere between 1-2 magnitude making the Starlink trains dimmer than an unfurled BlueWalker.

Currently, Starlink satellites sit somewhere in the 3-5 range of magnitudes. Most suburban sky may have a limiting magnitude due to light pollution around 4 – 5, just to put all of this into perspective.

So circling back to the story at hand here, these are big satellites, big enough that CEO Abel Avellan proudly proclaimed on X when the company first tested the BlueWalkers, “Made in TX – size matters!” The hope and dream of AST is that they launch upwards of 168 satellites. AST will be servicing the AT&T cellular network here in the States.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there, AST wants to put up satellites three and a half times bigger than the current BlueBirds which already sit at 693 square feet. Unfurled BlueBirds right now are currently larger than a studio apartment!

It should be noted that I did reach out to AST to be a guest on our Why It’s So Bright at Night segment – and I have yet to hear a response from them.

Well, international lawyer, William Grant, feels that New Zealand has a duty to protect the night skies from this assault by ever larger, and brighter, low earth orbit eye sores! He cites the many New Zealand Indigenous communities that rely on nighttime skies for cultural significance and pleads for a recognition of entrepreneurial enthusiasm with government backed restraint in the form of regulations for New Zealand based space economy manufacturers.  Grant hopes that New Zealand can set a precedent that can then be utilized as a legal foundation for responsible industry practices.

An additional cause for concern derives from researchers in an article in Geophysical Research Letters, who identified an estimated 646% increase in atmospheric aluminum oxides per year stemming from the high amount of reentry of disposable low earth orbit satellites.  The fear is that aluminum oxides may speed up ozone layer depletion, thus undoing the lone climate problem that humanity has been able to see eye to eye on.

Let’s talk about measurements. This is a pretty important topic, isn’t it? We never talk about innovations in this field…well unless past guest Ken Walczak is on.

We had a couple of articles come through this month that discussed some innovative approaches to obtaining nighttime sky brightness measurements. The go-to device that many will use to measure the nighttime sky is the Sky Quality Meter, often abbreviated to ‘SQM.’ The SQM meter runs in the low $100s USD, and for some reason is listed on Amazon under ‘Musical Instruments’… quite odd, but what if you simply aren’t happy with the SQM meter and you want to try something different?

Here’s a Do-It-Yourself project that comes to us via Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. The cylindrical devices look to be slightly longer than a standard cell phone. The data collected then is fed into the Gaia Map of the Brightness of the Natural Sky model, known by the acronym GAMBONS. The devices not only measure light but also temperature and humidity.

It’s actually quite a clever device that can even integrate with the open source Home Assistant software. One article even has the total components priced at $65, which pins it at half the rate of the commercial Unihedron SQM musical instrument, I mean meter.

And there’s also this other option, which I think could offer more practical applications for municipal officers – ie code enforcement officers and municipal lighting engineers. In a paper from the journal, Drones, researchers attempted to build a purposeful drone with the explicit goal of measuring light pollution at a micro level – that is at say a warehouse facility, a specific street lamp, or even a house.

For you at home, in case you were wondering, the study described the drone, which includes spectral radiance tools, illuminance measurements from a built in spectrometer, and a camera featuring 9 bands of spectrum imagery between 444 to 865 nm as being able to obtain both downward and upward measurements and can be downloaded into databases utilizing georeferencing.

Before we leave this segment, I wanted to bring up some findings from a study in the Journal of Urban Management. Maybe we can do this with the Price is Right rules.

Researchers polled 358 individuals between 15-65 to see what they knew about light pollution.  Now I’m going to ask you, my fine guests, to pick a number closest to the real number without going over.

Question number one – in this study, what percentage of folks polled heard of the term ‘Light Pollution?’

Question number two – what percentage of folks polled claimed that they ‘Sometimes’ heard the term ‘Light Pollution’ in their daily life?

Question number three – what percentage of folks claimed to be ‘Somewhat aware’ of the potential threat of ‘Light Pollution’?

For those at home who are just curious – the study found that 76% of respondents felt that artificial light had impacted them and 91% felt that awareness of the issue was important.

Finishing up tonight, we have three more articles.

First up, rejoice! We only have one streetlight story this month! Hallelujah! Holy Shit! Where’s the Tylenol!

How about this! The concessionaire of Memphis, TN’s new LED conversion won an award from the Department of Energy for its ‘Sustainability in Lighting!’  The conversion is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Memphis by 26,000 tons!!

Technically, it’s a win for climate change. However, there are no ecological protections built into these lights so I wouldn’t claim it as a victory yet for the environment.

Memphis hopes to finish its conversion by the end of this year. It currently is in the process of converting all 77,000 streetlights to a more responsible 3000K warm white LED. Once done, the city anticipates the brisk elimination of all crime known to man and people joining hands, singing kumbaya together on a nightly basis.

Next, over in the UK, it looks like headlights may be in the ultrabright LED streetlight spotlight, not as if you actually need headlights in cities these days. The UK government is looking at a way to evaluate the causes and “countermeasures” of headlight glare induced temporary driver blindness, called “dazzling.”

In a survey released by the British equivalent to AAA, the RAC, found that 89% of a population of 2,000 drivers felt that headlights from oncoming cars are too bright, and smaller percentages experienced dazzling, and even upwards of 7% of drivers under 65 to 14% of drivers over 65 have given up on nighttime driving all together due to dazzling!

The most pressing part of the RAC report stated that 68% of drivers polled were unable to see clearly again for almost five seconds!

Finally, tonight – here’s something that’s both fun and very pertinent, atleast given the date that we’re recording this month’s show. In Flushing, NY, the New York Mets have found a way to add a modest but impactful visual light show in their stadium during this year’s Pennant run.

The Montreal based company, PixMob installed over 3500 LED strips on railings throughout the entire ballpark of Citi Field. As the night continues on, the stadium lights are actually dimmed down some to provide the visual contrast of a rising royal blue and orange emanating out of the isles, (those are Mets’ colors for you who have no idea about baseball).