Banish the Darkness
Can you find your place among all these lighted places?
Serving Suggestion: Find your place, your spot on earth, close as you can, within America’s lightscape. It will be easier the darker your surroundings.
In a city, sorry. You’ll be somewhere in a smear of night light. From there, if you look up, you’ll rarely see any but the brightest stars.
To see your own light show, go to MeteoEarth.com to zoom in and out on the eastern US (if that’s where you live) and find your place in the dark. Or more likely, your place in the artificial electric daytime of the America that never sleeps. (Of course you’ll have to view the site during dark hours to see the lights on. And I suggest you turn OFF the wind visualization.)
Above is a screenshot of my part of the world from MeteoEarth’s wonderful maps. If you look closely, you’ll see me standing out in the yard waving as the satellite cameras pass overhead. Failing that, find the red dot north of Floyd town. That’s me. We have it nicely dark here in rural northeast Floyd County. At least for now.
But if you want nighttime darkness in the east, one of your best bets is along the VA-WV border in and adjacent to Bath, Highlands and Allegheny counties.
Mercury-vapored nights are convenient and we spend more money that keeps the Big Box folks afloat when their acres of asphalt are lit for our shopping pleasure. Don’t ask me WHY so many downtown city highrises stay torched to the max all the night long. It’s just what we do. The electric utilities love the idea, don’t you imagine?
But we did not come up this way — not us baby boomers (imagine time lapse of night skies from the 40s to now) and not us sapient humans. Round the clock light is new and it may have a dark side.
“Humans have peak visual sensitivity to the yellow and green parts of the visible spectrum, says George Brainard, a photobiologist at Thomas Jefferson University who was not involved with Falchi’s study. But it is blue-white light — exactly of the sort most produced by cheap LEDs — that dominates the regulation of human circadian rhythms and other important biological cycles, Brainard says.
“The wide-scale adoption of LEDs will reap huge energy savings, which is a good thing,” Brainard says. “The question is, are the great energy savings compromising human health and ecosystems?”
New Night Sky maps will serve as a baseline to measure the effectiveness of efforts to reduce scatter, adjust unhealthy wavelengths and eliminate wasted electricity for unnecessary and potentially harmful night brightness.
Meanwhile, if you dim your lights as a consideration of your highway neighbors, the please turn off your outdoor floods and “security” lights for those who share a common sky, who would love to be able to see the Milky Way from their deck out back.
