We Need Better Resolution!

LPN July 2024
Light Pollution News Podcast
Light Pollution News Podcast
We Need Better Resolution!
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July 2024: We Need Better Resolution!, Light Pollution News.

Host:

Bill McGeeney

Guests:

Lya Osborn

Lya Shaffer Osborn is a multidisciplinary designer, writer, literary translator, and environmental justice advocate in Seattle, WA. Lya is a co-founder of LightJustice.org, which works to make social advocacy resources accessible to the lighting community and beyond. She also serves as the North America Regional Director for Unolai Lighting Design, contributing to a diverse range of international projects and award-winning design efforts over the past nine years. Lya received a double MFA in Lighting Design and Interior Design from Parsons The New School for Design, where her thesis work challenged the industry norms and incentives which have traditionally defined a designer’s role in society, proposing alternate modes of directing design resources to historically disadvantaged populations. Lya is a member of the International Association of Lighting Designers, the Illuminating Engineering Society, and the International Dark Sky Association, and is Community Friendly Lighting Certified.

Josh Dury

Josh Dury Photo-Media AKA Starman (B.A. FRAS), is an Award-Winning Landscape Astrophotographer, Presenter, Speaker, and Writer from The Mendip Hills “Super National Nature Reserve” in Somerset, United Kingdom. His images have been recognized by NASA, TWAN, BBC, ITV, and CNN amongst others. Learn more about all of his work at his website JoshDuryPhoto-Media.com.

Ken Walczak

Senior Manager of the Far Horizons program at the Adler Planetarium, Co-Author of numerous papers on design and use of innovating instrumentation for light pollution research, and co-lead in the successful designation of the world’s largest Urban Night Sky Place, the Palos Preserves. Walczak is also a board member with Dark Sky International.

  1. New York, Philadelphia, Boston… Saturn. Astronaut captures lights of northeastern USA from Space Station, Iain Todd, BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
  2. Let there be Skyglow—light pollution from a large outdoor music festival (Lollapalooza Berlin 2016), Scientific Reports.
  3. Coupling Coordination Analysis of County Tourism Development and Multidimensional Poverty Based on Nighttime Light Data, Land.
  4. Artificial Light at Night: State of the Science 2024, Drew Reagan, Dark Sky International.
  5. Monitoring, trends and impacts of light pollution, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
  6. Saudi Arabia to build world’s largest dark sky reserve for stargazing, The News.
  7. The remote Argentinean community that is saving the stars, Megan Eaves, BBC.
  8. Pala Band of Mission Indians lends support to Dark Skies Initiative, Village News.
  9. Astronomers versus activists: the battle over San Diego’s streetlights, Robert P Crease, Physics World.
  10. The rhea constellation, StephanieChauvin.com.
  11. Keeping The Body’s Multiple Clocks in Sync Could Be The Secret to Slowing Aging, David Nield, Science Alert.
  12. Clock-Talk: Interactions between Central and Peripheral Circadian Oscillators in Mammals, Cold Soring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology.
  13. The epidermal circadian clock integrates and subverts brain signals to guarantee skin homeostasis, Cell Stem Cell.
  14. Brain-muscle communication prevents muscle aging by maintaining daily physiology, Science.
  15. ‘Cosmic Baseball’ to illuminate the game like never before, Jason Foster, MLB.com.
  16. New Zealand issues Night Skies coins in two-coin set, Jeff Starck, Coin World.
  17. 2024 Dark Sky Light Sky Silver Proof Coin Set.
  18. Conserve Starry Skies, DMV.NV.
  19. New license plates to fund keeping Nevada skies dark, KTNV.
  20. Dark sky park gains international certification, Tracey Roxburgh, Otago Daily Times.
  21. Moab Achieves Dark Sky Community recognition, The Times-Independent.
  22. Carrickalinga becomes Australia’s first International Dark Sky Community, Drew Reagan, Dark Sky International.
  23. Night-time is an intoxicating new land: how learning to love the dark eased my grief, Annabel Abbs, The Guardian.

Ken, I know you have something you want to talk about. Before we jump into that, I came across a BBC Sky at Night article that discussed a recent photo from NASA’s Earth Observatory, which peered down the I-95 corridor from Boston to DC.

I thought this was pretty neat, and a very visual representation of just how little night we receive on this end of the country.

With Boston situated toward the bottom of the photo, you see a blank area while traveling southward to NYC, which is made up of several Connecticut state forests. Then we see New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford snake into Yonkers, whereby the rest of the city becomes one indistinguishable yellow blur. From there, you pass through North Jersey to Philadelphia, where you can barely make out the snaking Delaware River. Passing Philly, you see Wilmington’s lights, before a dark spot (the northern Chesapeake) then eventually you make it all the way to DC, of which I’m assuming Baltimore is somehow merged together in there. 

I thought this was a nice way to illustrate what you are going to discuss, Ken. You were one of the researchers who helped write the review article in Nature this past month, ‘Monitoring, trends and impacts of light pollution.’ The report appears to act as a concise summary of measurement deficiencies and impacts of light pollution.

In the same vein as Ken’s article, please do check out past guest, John Barentine, and team’sState of the Science’ report, which we have linked to here on this episode page. Barentine and team do a great job providing an exceedingly concise view of where science is on this topic. And by exceedingly concise, I mean it’s 14 pages long – and tends to be written in very readable English.  

In another article this month, a team of researchers measured the amount of light emissions from a 2016 performance of Lollapalooza in Berlin. I think we can all understand the need for an accompanying light show for musical acts. I’m going to age myself here, but as someone who’s attended Umphreys McGee shows for the past 15 years, I can certainly attest to the artistic qualities found in modern-performance-accompanying light shows. That’s not to account for parking and pedestrian lighting.

So, it’s no shock that Lallapalooza increased luminance levels, that is the amount of actual light polluting output by 8%. This study looks to be the first one to assess musical festival impact on the night.

Before we leave this area, I wanted to bring up a research article out of China that appeared in the Journal Land.  Researchers wanted to test how successful tourism activities were in alleviating poverty in select Chinese counties. Overall, it found that, yes, tourism does help reduce poverty.

However, the way they went about it was to use multiple variables, including nighttime light. Nighttime lighting, in this case, was found to be more abundant in tourist rich areas, thereby correlating well with lower levels of poverty.

Elsewhere in the world, did you guys hear about this? Saudi Arabia looks to beat out Big Bend for the largest Dark Sky Reserve. The Reserve would sit as part of the Kingdom’s aggressive Red Sea Global project that currently focuses on blending ecotourism with extreme luxury resorts. Given all the ambitious, unique projects going on in Saudi Arabia, it must be a very exciting time to be part of the Kingdom.

If you’re interested in checking out the potential future reserve, you can book your own private island via Ritz-Carlton for a modest $2k.

A very hopeful story out of Argentina, and Ken, I’m sure you’re quite familiar with this one. As listeners of this podcast are aware, back in December we had Travis Novitsky talk about the cultural significance of Native American ties to the night sky – all of which can be found in his picturesque book, I can’t recommend this one enough, Spirits Dancing.

This one comes to us via an article Megan Eaves wrote for the BBC. I highly recommend you swing over to our website and click on the link for this one.

Pinched between Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil is the brilliant Misiones Province of Argentina. Given the providence’s location relative to Paraguay, it’s heavily influenced by native American traditions, specifically of the Guarani people.

The community there has been working on conservation from all angles, including building protections for their night sky heritage. The project, titled the Cielo Guarani, the Guarani Sky, has come about in part due to the hard work of a Dark Sky advocate named Alejandro Sommer.

The community hopes to obtain a dark sky reserve, creating what they claim is the only global place to “legally protect the sky, soil, and waters.”

Traditionally, the Tape Kue, the Milky Way as translated to the Old Road from Guarani, carries with it a not so unfamiliar tale. Whereby, the Tape Kue serves as a path to and for the afterlife.

And to explore this a little more – as a hobby, I stargaze, and, as I was telling Chris and Shane over at the Actual Astronomy Podcast, that I’ve been working my way through an asterism list, whereby you attempt to find a very large list of asterisms in the night sky.

So this stuff naturally intrigues me – while researching this article, I came across a brilliant video by Stephanie Chauvin, who conveys the story of the Rhea constellation. Rhea birds are distant relatives to African ostriches native to South America. Contained inside the boundaries of the sizable Rhea constellation are 9 Greek/European constellations with the posterior area covered by the constellation Scorpius.

I’m going to play this for my guests here on this recording, I highly recommend if this stuff fascinates you, that you at home take a look at this video, too. The link can be found over at LightPollutionNews.com.

Side note, how about this! The Guarani have a god that is the protector of the yerba mate plant and siestas! The god, Jasy Jatere.

Staying on the cultural impact front, the Luiseño peoples, who originally inhabited most of the San Diego through the Los Angeles coast, have utilized the night sky as a resource for centuries, including as a calendar for planting crops and for explaining the world.

Their heritage system is quite intriguing, in that the Coyote appears to have outsized influence! It’s said that the coyote “scattered glowing embers into the sky, creating the stars that illuminate our nights.” Each star in the sky has a particular tale or event of the coyote’s journey attached to it.

The Milky Way, itself, shows up in traditions such as youth initiation ceremonies, whereby objects themselves used to bestow the rites represent the Milky Way.

And there’s even an interesting rock located within tribal territory. The ‘Wanawut Rock,’ which contains a white quartz streak that spiritually binds the earth to the sky, via the thicket of the Milky Way. 

This story appeared in my feeds as the tribal peoples have agreed to support the Fallbrook, California Beautification Alliance’s attempt to become a certified Dark Sky Community.

Now this story does come with an asterisk. The lands being discussed here sit below the historically embattled CalTech Palomar Observatory. Palomar must deal with significant light domes both near and far to the west, including numerous tribal casinos.

Here’s something on the health front. Two recent studies, one in Science and one in Cell Stem Cell, point to why the alignment of circadian clocks is so important. The source of the alignment appears to derive from what researchers deem, the ‘central circadian clock,’ the suprachiasmatic nucleus area of the brain that is triggered by photoreceptors in your vision system.

That centralized clock directs a second, peripheral body clock that manages cellular level body processes. It falls out of alignment when the body’s centralized clock is miscued due to something such as jet lag, or other non-standard day-night issues such as irregular night shift work. 

Researchers in these studies believe that alignment between the two clocks will slow the pace of degeneration of bodily functions that occur with aging.

First up, would you attend a “Cosmic Baseball” game? Well, the same concept that was applied to bowling in the late 90s, for those of you old enough to remember, has apparently been applied to a minor league baseball game.

In Colonial Heights, VA, the Tri-City Chili Peppers made history on June 1st as the first baseball game to be played under black light.  Given the success of the game, they look to repeat this later in the season.

A little back story here, the team employed lighting professionals and a budget to the tune of $100k to create the event (although the actual price tag far exceeded budget). The team used 18, 500-watt black lights to provide a uniform, shadow free black light experience.

I can’t speak to how healthy it is to bathe players and fans in black light for a couple of hours, but everyone who participated appeared to enjoy it.

Unfortunately, the event was not without its challenges! Batters complained about not being able to pick up ball spin and fielders in the outfield had a difficult time gauging pop flies.

But beyond that, perhaps a new avenue for nighttime ball?

Next time you head to Aukland, maybe pick up some collectible coins? The New Zealand postal service, ‘NZ Post’, released a coin set that commemorates the Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve on one side with a jetting 45 degree milky way, and the southern lights on the other with an orange-red glow from the surface.

Now, while they are technically $1 silver coins, the set retails for a hefty $425 NZD / $261 USD. Despite the price, they sure do look nice! Only 500 sets were minted. The designer was Helen Perkins.

And do you love a natural night? Do you live in Nevada? Why not show it with a ‘Save Starry Skies’ license plate?  The license plate debuted in May, featuring a family peering up at a star rich sky, and the big dipper asterism. Portions of the proceeds will go to the Nevada Wilderness organization to help protect many things in Nevada, amongst which include the natural night.

I want to finish up tonight with an article from the Guardian. I can’t say enough about this piece, and hope that you are able to support Annabel Abbs, the author of ‘Night-time is an intoxicating new land: how learning to love the dark eased my grief.”

I have a hypothesis about our incessant fear of the night. While it’s probably a good thing to have an underlying fear of the dark, the same way it is to say heights, the less we encounter darkness, the more unprepared we are to handle it, and our fear becomes less about rationality and more about crippling immobilization.

I used to have a fear of heights, and I still do, but years of climbing conditioned me to manage that fear, understand my risks, and ascertain the mental capacity to control that fear.

Well, Abbs appears to, in very much the same way, have flexed that muscle to manage and control any fear of the dark that she may have in her.

Abbs speaks to a variety of positive nighttime experiences including night swimming and hiking, and a newfound appreciation for the uniqueness of unlit night, but her most important thesis here derives from this quote, “when we welcome darkness, we give nocturnal nightlife a better chance of survival. Stars and meteors are clearer. Moreover, we keep our night vision working, we sleep better and enjoy improved mental health, and we encounter our rewired night selves – and discover in all its transcendent and adventurous guises

I think that sums up nicely the mission of advocates and defenders of a natural night.

I hope everyone here in the Northern Hemisphere has a great start to their summer, and conversely, as the constellations Rhea and Matariki rise in the Southern Hemisphere, a seasonable start to winter / and the New Zealander New Year.


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