Earth is running out of places for stargazers to do dark deeds in the name of science

Increasing levels of light pollution means Earth's surface has almost no practical locations for astronomical observatories, a group of astronomers said on Monday. Artificial light emitted from buildings, streetlights, and reflected from satellite constellations are making the night sky brighter for earth-bound skywatchers. …

[TheMaskedMan]

I sympathize with them. As a kid in the 70s I was a keen amatuer astronomer. Living in a large suburban area in the north west UK, conditions weren't ideal, but you could get by. And then, seemingly overnight, a new road layout appeared - dual carriageway, huge roundabout right on my doorstep, so much lighting that the nights seemed like day. Scratch one hobby that could easily have become a career!

By the 80s, I'd discovered computers and was sitting up all night wrestling with BASIC instead of peering through my telescope, but I still almost automatically stop and look up whenever I stray into an area with dark, clear skies. Unfortunately, I also rely on ubiquitous broadband to get things done as much as everyone else. If the likes of Starlink can deliver that connectivity to a nice dark rural area, maybe I can get back to my astronomy when I retire.

I certainly can't see pleas for dark skies getting much more than lip service from governments, if that. Astronomy just isn't high on their list of priorities. It doesn't produce anything they can export or tax, and doesn't employ enough people to be significant come polling day. Indeed, an awful lot of people don't see the point of astronomy at all, and I'm sure that will include a lot of politicians:(

[big_D]

We have a flood plane near where I live. On a good night, you can just about make out the Milky Way, it is very faint and there is no detail, but you can just about make out the outline, if you know what you are looking for. But that is very rare these days, in most of the rest of the town, you can't see much at all, apart from the big stars. Even the 7 Sisters (Pleiades) can only be seen outside of town.

Another annoyance is a string of satellites that light up the sky for about 2-3 hours after sunset. There are 4 of them running from South East to West. I'm assuming they are SpaceX/Starlink ones, as they appeared a couple of days after a recent Starlink launch.

[David 132]

A few years ago I was in Hawaii, on Big Island (so, technically, on Hawaii too). My wife and I drove up Mauna Kea one night. There's the James Clark Maxwell telescope at the summit of course, but also a visitor centre part way up, and on that night the local astronomy society had set up their telescopes in the car park there for public use.

I've never before, or since, seen such a spectacular view of the night sky. It was incredible; no exaggeration, it was like looking at a live version of the ST:TNG opening credits; I half expected the Enterprise to swoop into view at some point.

(And yes, I know, saying "the night sky looked as good as the credits from a fictional TV show" does sound rather sad, come to think of it...)

Anyway it really brought home to us just how degraded the night sky is in most of the Western world, and what we've lost almost without noticing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Radio too...

The radio spectrum is also being buried under a dense fog of switchmode noise. The wonder of tiny radio signals that can be heard around the world may also vanish in a generation.

[Mike 137]

Re: Radio too...

Interestingly, there's a diagonal band across my house where a portable radio picks up an almost white tearing noise that swamps any channel tuned to. It's about half a metre wide.

[C R Mudgeon]

"If the likes of Starlink can deliver that connectivity to a nice dark rural area"

It seems unlikely, seeing as they're a big offender. In the act of delivering the connectivity, they'll destroy the darkness.

[TheMaskedMan]

"It seems unlikely, seeing as they're a big offender. In the act of delivering the connectivity, they'll destroy the darkness."

Yes, I've been following the Starlink v star gazers issue for a while. It's ironic that the thing that would enable me to move somewhere isolated would remove the primary reason for going.

[big_D]

After a recent Starlink launch, a string of 4 bright objects appeared in the evening sky, they are very bright for about 2-3 hours after the sun goes down. I don't know for certain, but given the coincidental timing, I assume they are Starlinks.

[Neil Barnes]

I,

I live among the creatures of the night

I haven't got the will to try and fight

Against a new tomorrow, so I guess I'll just believe it

That tomorrow never comes

[Laura Brannigan]

[stiine]

For lights on private property, there should be limits to how far beyond your own property lines that your light can be visible. As an example, the jackass who lives across the street put a motion activated light on the corner of his house. The sensor zone extends across the street in front...The lights illuminate his front yard, his side yard, my side yard, and the side of my house up to the roof line...asshole. Then there's his neighbor. That fuckwad installed a loading dock light, like you'd have on the back of a warehouse...above his garage door. It illuminates the entire fucking street....asshole.

Then there's the truck farm a block away. They replaced their high pressure sodium lighting with LED lights. They illuminate more property that isn't theirs than property that is.

[Sceptic Tank]

You live in a rough neighbourhoud, yes?

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Time

To be a arsehole back......In a Victor Meldrew fashion.

"The Council have fitted new streetlamps, but in a typical show of Victor's luck, a milk tanker drives straight into the one outside their home, causing it to bend and smash clean through their bedroom window, illuminating the room in a hideous orange glow all night long!"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called progress

We used to have strong environmental controls over the "Special Landscape Area" where I live - one step down from "Area of Outstanding Beauty" that the rest of the Jurassic Edge has - this constrained development including a "dark skies" policy.

The District Council was replaced by a Unitary, which promptly threw out most of the regulations and completely changed the planning process.

Now around the valley I can see 4 Menage, all brightly lit at night, meaning that we no longer have a dark sky.

The Unitary Council calls it progress!

Our tiny village High Street was mainly built before 1700 and is full of listed (mainly mud construction) buildings that abut to the narrow paths and road. The Unitary is actively working to ensure that we cannot get a weight limit to stop the 44 tonne lorries that shake the houses like an earthquake between magnitude 3 and 4. (We have a Physical Geography Professor who has used his seismology kit to measure it! Put simply, doors rattle in my house, but crockery can be heard shaking in some houses even closer to the road.) . Again the Unitary Council calls it progress!.

Very little in the modern world has a positive benefit on the natural or historic built world.

[Anon as anyone can work out my geographic location fairly easily from the above.]

[big_D]

Re: It's called progress

Our local council uses "shielded" lighting, which has reflectors pointing down above the lights, reflecting more light at the ground, but less up into the sky. It doesn't help for looking at the stars from ground level, when under the lights, but once you get out of range, the sky isn't too bright. Go a couple of KM outside the centre of town and you can see the outline of the Milky Way on a good night - but you have to know what you are looking for, otherwise it looks like a discoloured halo around the other stars.

I can even see Pleiades with the naked eye, when I go out and walk the dog at night, something I rarely saw, when I was in the UK.

[Sceptic Tank]

Climate small change

"Governments around the world should and can tackle light pollution in the same ways they address climate change:" By shelling out great deals of taxpayer money to make people who sell wind turbines extremely rich? Those are the people who drive this whole climate change show, because they have stuff to sell.

Anyway, if I were into astronomy as a hobby I would be fuming at that statement to turn my instruments at a patch of sky not littered with human artifacts. I mean: if the sun is in the seventh house and I want to check out Jupiter aligning with Mars but it's not conveniently happening in a window devoid of human remains?

[Joe W]

Re: Climate small change

You clearly have read the current scientific literature on climate change... (and no, they are not paid by "big wind"[*], none of them are, at least the ones I know).

[*] yes, there are some projects on projecting wind speed, storms, etc. for the future, but the companies are interested in information where to put the turbines so they are as effecticve as possible and not constantly wrecked by storms.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Climate small change

Not in the UK. The Wind developers get the government grants, no matter how much electricity is actually produced, hence the developers often put the inland turbines where it is easiest to put them.

Next time you drive along the M1 look at the huge numbers between Northampton and Leicester, where access is easy, but wind velocity is not very good.

It is the incentive that is wrong, not the technology!

[Zolko]

Re: Climate small change

astronomy [...] if the sun is in the seventh house and I want to check out Jupiter aligning with Mars

all your downvoters seem to have missed the subtle irony. But I thank-you for that

[Dante Alighieri]

Re: Climate small change

Thank you fir the hint, this is pertinent from NASA

linky to NASA Age of Aquarius

--------> astronomer

[stiine]

Have they tried North Korea? I've seen some meme's that seem to indicate that anywhere outside of the capitol should be dark as a closed coffin.

[Pete 2]

Though as the article says, darkness is only one aspect. There's little point having pristine, dark, skies if it's permanently cloudy.

Likewise, when the Moon is up and anywhere near full, nobody has *truly* dark skies.

[Mike 137]

The same is happening to sound

It's not just a problem with light. There are very few accessible places now where anthropogenic noise is not a significant contributor to the background, and the dominant contributor on land is road traffic noise. Up to now, fortuitously, reasonably distant road traffic noise has been dominantly in the low frequency band up to about 200 Hz with its peak around 50-70 Hz. This is well below the frequencies of primary interest to most naturalists (except, for example, those studying long distance elephant communication) so it's not been a huge problem and can be filtered out quite easily. But with the (accepted) necessity to move to electric vehicles the situation changes dramatically as electric motor noise not only sits well within the frequency bands of interest but has a very much wider bandwidth itself. So we'll have to contend with both the low and relatively stable frequencies of tyre noise and the high and widely variable frequencies of the electric motors.

We're going to have to develop some very clever filtering technologies to suppress this noise from recordings -- maybe a legitimate opportunity for AI?

[Ideasource]

Only red light.

And not be a perfect solution, but I think it would help out quite a bit if lights at night were limited to low frequency red light only.

Red light doesn't kill night vision.

But still lets you see.

So then you can see what's illuminated but also still see behind the light source.

[Dante Alighieri]

Timed lights

Why can't we just switch off street lights 0100-0500 to give us all a break.

But also deal with light polluting domestic and farm lights.

I used to enjoy my local street light being broken. Now an ultrabright LED.

I live 10 miles (sorry I'll post the length in whales shortly as per the Reg standards) from a Dark Sky reserve,

so in the right places I can count a lot of stars in pegasus, or orion depending on which citizen science I'm doing.