We are a nation of cowards, afraid of the dark. About a month ago my son sent me a photograph of the night sky he had taken in Arizona near where he lives. It reminded me of just how much a lot of the rest of us have forgotten about what a dark night sky can look like. All because of man's habit of always ending up making too much of a good thing.
Clearly, electric lighting was a boon to mankind. Electric is safer than using kerosene or gas for lighting, and it's far better for our eyesight. That said, we humans have taken something good and turned it into something else.
I fully understand and even appreciate well-done landscape lighting. When I walk down my street at night I appreciate the lighting on the exterior of the neighboring church that highlights the beautiful architecture but just past the church are two parking lots, both owned by the church and you could easily read the fine print on the back of your credit card without any trouble at all. There are no events happening at the church and yet they keep those parking lot floodlights on all night. Across the street is a local funeral home which is in a nice turn of the century house. Again, they have some appropriate landscape lighting and some light pointing toward the front of the house where their name shows on a sign....on one side of the house is a parking lot and again...bright floodlights wash the entire parking lot and the whole side of the house with brilliant light. No night activities are going on...the funeral director and his wife live upstairs and are probably watching TV. I bet they don't need any nightlights in their apartment.
Why do my street lights shine light not only down at the street/sidewalk where it's nice to have some light, but also directly upward?
Has there been some horrible crime spree in my neighborhood I'm not aware of? It seems to me to be a terrible waste of electricity, but as importantly it is the very real source of pollution of our night sky. Are we really so afraid that we need all that light? Studies have shown that light pollution is bad for the environment as well as human health.
My grandparents lived on a farm a few miles from town. I remember going to visit them after dark. They turned on the outside light when company came at night and turned it off when the company left. It always felt like a welcome to me. In the summer we could lay in the yard and look at the stars without being blinded by a lot of neighborhood light. When I look up at the night sky from my house today the number of stars visible is perhaps a third or a quarter of what I can see when I visit our son in Arizona and what I remember seeing when I grew up on the farm.
Am I foolish because I'm not more afraid? Can't we just turn down the lumens a little and redirect them to where they are actually of use? The photograph above was one of my early experiments with long exposure night shots to capture star trails. It was taken late at night Aug 7, 2003 at 11:30 PM. I was about 13 or 14 miles north of Lafayette and ten miles west of Delphi. It was a dark night, the moon was just past first quarter and was low in the west at my back. I was facing east. My lens was open for 83 seconds. The yellow-orange glow left of the barn is Delphi light...ten miles distant. The glow on the right is Lafayette and some of that light is well over 15 miles away. I leave you with this question, Do we really need our towns and cities lighted up so bright that they are visible from space?
