Light pollution is getting worse, but there is a movement to make our skies dark again

https://www.cnn.com/science/light-pollution-dark-skies-c2e-spc/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit

by cnn

3 comments

  1. When a series of lightning strikes took down power across New York City on the night of July 13, 1977, streetlights, neon signs, and the bright lights of houses and skyscrapers went dark.

    And just like that, for the first time in decades, [the Milky Way could be seen](https://www.cnn.com/science/light-pollution-dark-skies-c2e-spc/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit) streaked across the black sky, speckled by thousands of shimmering stars.

    “I saw a (starry) sky from my location in the Bronx,” said Joe Rao, a meteorologist and amateur astronomer who was living in New York City on the night of the blackout, “which I had never seen before and have never seen again.”

    Barring a freak power outage, the light emanating from towns and cities due to unnatural light sources is so bright that it washes out the stars. Today [one-third of all humans, including 80% of North Americans, cannot see the Milky Way](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600377).

  2. Sedona, AZ has laws in place where you can’t have any lights that expose light upwards. it’s actually pretty cool. so their street lamps etc. all have covers on the top and at night the whole city is so much darker, the starry sky you can see from anywhere. It’s still lit well enough to drive and walk around, but it’s kind of like a noir film with stark contrasting cones of light pointing down.

Comments are closed.