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Good to know that light pollution is getting more attention. Now, if only we can somehow merge the urbanist movement and the "Dark Sky" movement, we'll be a tad closer to a utopia. Imagine having walkable cities where you can see the Milky Way at night.
I can already hear all the suburban pearl clutching
Tell them you'd value a house more if you could see more stars in the area.
As a flashlight enthusiast that understands beam patterns and lighting pretty well, it frustrates me to no end how much light we throw into the sky for no reason. Just point stuff at the ground in a floodyish beam pattern. There's no reason to throw light in a 180° pattern, let alone anything more than that.
There’s one city near me that literally has streetlights that point upwards. They’re supposed to be artsy, with upward-facing lamps that reflect off of a curved plate. But the plate isn’t big enough to catch and reflect the entire flood, so those lights are shooting straight into the air for like 50% of their total beam spread.
I live in Europe, and I only have seen the milky way once while traveling. I really can't express how beautiful it is. You'd think those images on the internet with the purple glow are heavily edited, but that's really how it looks like. Light pollution is awful, and I hope we can turn it back so everybody can experience the beauty of space from their own back yard.
I like to do astrophotography in my freetime and I can recommend tools like light pollution maps and the Bortle scale to check out your surrounding area.
It gives a good idea where better skies might be not too far away. For where I live in Germany, there are bortle 4 skies (scale goes up to 9, the lower the less pollution).
I can see the Milkyway in the southern sky during summer from the driveway, but as soon as you get to a "bigger" city that starts to become harder/impossible.
I visited LaPalma (Canary Islands) a few years ago and that was one of the best experiences I ever had:
Up at the highest peak (> 2400 m) watching the sun set and having the night take over. Milkyway as clear as you can imagine! LaPalma is doing a lot to keep it that way, and I hope more cities would care for our beautiful nightsky the way they do.
Italy also has great skies, especially the more rural areas, here is one example from 2023:
Exactly, I saw the actual night sky once in my life when traveling and it was breathtaking, I cannot believe how people don't even know what we've given up. I also thought those nat geo / Nasa pictures were computer generated recreations, but you can actually see that with your naked eyes
I was born in the wilderness of Nordic Lappland, no cities at all anywhere near, small villages only, spread very sparsely across a lot of nothingness.
No light pollution at all. Our village didn’t even have street lights anywhere outside the local school vicinity (we never had more than 20 or so students in total, across all the elementary grades through pre to 1-6!). 300 residents total. Closest proper town was roughly 200km away.
Yet, I have never seen the Milky Way. I’ve seen plenty of stars, there’s always stars unless extremely cloudy. And we’d get auroras almost bi-daily throughout the polar winters. But no Milky Way. No purple to speak of.
I wonder if this is tied to the location within earth? Always had a clear sky, no artificial lights polluting it even from afar. No cities, no smogs of any kind. But never did see purple or the Milky Way. In winters we also have literal months when the sun doesn’t even rise properly at all, just night all the time. So sky is very visible.
This is absolutely confusing to me, are you supposed to see the Milky Way with clear skies 😔?
My wife was a born and raised big city girl. She never knew what a real night sky looked like outside of the 20 or so brightest objects you can see in the city. She was well travelled, but only to other cities. She has never even gone camping.
When we were dating, after discovering she had not seen a real night sky in her life, late one night I took her on a drive out to the outer edge of farm country. Not even close to actual dark sky, but way better than anything she had ever seen. It was a magical moment. She never knew you could see the milky way, let alone Andromeda with your eyes.
Imagine being a young adult woman and only ever having seen a handful of the brightest stars. Some boy you dig, but barely know gets all excited when the conversation turns to astronomy, which you know nothing about and aside from polite conversation with this boy, don't care about at all. He suddenly gets this cheshire cat's grin, whisks you into his car at 11pm on a Friday and drives 2 hours out into the country at 1am, on a whim.
You're tired and nervous. The drive is long enough for various weird scenarios to pop into your head, not all of them good. How well do you know this boy? He stops the car at a dead end dirt road without so much as a streetlight. Just farms and forest in the distance. Its a warm summer night. He turns off the car and gets out. It takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the darkness after the headlights go out. He gets out of the car and opens the door for you. A cool gentle breeze blows on your face and you can hear crickets chirping. He holds both your hands warmly, gives you the biggest smile, looks deep into your eyes in a long silence. Eventually he says "Now look up". You follow his eyes as they turn skyward.
Then you see it all for the first time.
Married now for ~ 20 years, and while I've had more than my fair share of less than charming moments, she still says when I put in the effort, I can be devastatingly romantic.
Awww. That's beautiful.
I grew up in rural Texas. One of the few joys I had was being able to look up into the sky and see the Milky Way just about every night.
Grew up in a rural town (less than 800), was my favorite part. The early/late running or intimate backroad walks was incredible
My feet are still hard as rocks from walking on the hot pavement so much when I was younger.
Ive heard barefoot is healthier but damn if its not uncomfortable
When my wife and I went on our honeymoon, we spent a night at sea in what's supposed to be one of the darkest places in the Carribean on the same night there was a shuttle launch. I was so supremely excited to see the true sky. Literally a once in a lifetime experience.
We got hit with a storm. The launch was scrubbed. We spent the night restricted below deck, trying to navigate hallways that almost felt like you could walk on the walls. It was an amazing trip, but I'm still bummed about that night.
Ah that's too bad. Some other user here posted a picture of a light pollution map which you can easily find online. You could use it if you are looking for a vacation spot in the future.
It's truly a sight.
Lol I grew up in rural areas and remember my mom being excited about the northern lights and watching them from our front porch, wondering what was so special about some lights in the night sky, which was already full of lights.
At least my daughter has been growing up in towns all her life so far and appreciated seeing them this past year, unlike the little shit I was.
Yeah, I live in the middle of that big bright spot. I've got no idea what the milky way looks like.
I have never seen it. Now that I think of it I wonder if a few times while roadtripping if I might have had a chance to see it but had not thought to go out at night and try to get a glimpse.
This should be a law everywhere, not just rich neighborhoods. Sodium for the win! Its way better for peoples sleep/circadian rhythms. I hate this shit that of course poor people dont deserve to sleep after they get in from their streetwalking
There's no reason why LEDs can't mimic sodium lights, they just dont because the boomers buying them were raised on the belief that cooler and brighter is better.
What is it with Boomers and the ugliest light, I've been to some houses where their house was literally lit like a news studio at fucking 8 at night, like i have no idea how they ever sleep. It was beyond disturbing
People just don't take the time to learn about and understand things, lighting included. Of course, it isn't helped by misleading marketing and such.
My mum replaced one of the two hallway lights with a cool daylight CFL, next to a warm white one.
I found it genuinely disturbing that it didn't bother her.
Wild
Went to visit my family over the holidays and they had replaced the lights in my old bedroom (a fan with 4 sockets) with 4x 150-W-equivalent cold-as-ice LEDs. I turned the lights on and immediately was blinded.
I turned around, went to home depot, and bought 4x 40-W equivalent warm-as-possible LEDs and made the swap. We'll see what's there next time I visit - I may have started a silent war.
I fully support having loads of light in a room, four 150w equivalents sounds awesome for cleaning or working on a project, but put that shit on a dimmer, of course making sure they're dimmable LEDs. Also, of course, like 3000-4000K color temp (unless they're in a bathroom or kitchen where 5000K is acceptable imo)
My grandparents the same. I use their LED candles for light lol. Its so far the opposite of what I'm used to. I'm a Hue colored bulbs home where I constantly mess around with colors and palettes and my place is like deep dark red after 7pm. Its always an—lets call it adjustment
I miss when most cars had halogens and all street lights were mostly sodium besides a few mercury lights. Night driving used to be something I actually enjoyed doing and now it’s something I despise…
What crazy is that, due to the US' outdated laws around headlights, we aren't allowed to have the best headlight technology. Matrix/Adaptive headlights can turn off just the portion of headlights aiming at other vehicles, meaning the driver gets full brights, and doesn't blind other drivers. It's the best of both worlds. It's super cool tech, but not allowed in the US. Some cars sold here even have the hardware, but have it disabled due to regulations, with the headlights just functioning as normal dumb headlights.
That’s still assuming the detection of oncoming vehicles is good and the window/camera system is cleared and quick enough.
The auto high beams on my in-law’s new Honda doesn’t instill confidence that this will always be the case.
I'm not sure Honda has developed a system like that yet. It's mostly associated with European vehicles, from what I've seen.
Funny how my neighborhood has sodium lamps but the poorer part has LEDs. My part of the street recently stopped lighting them at all so now I can see the stars, it's glorious
Okay monsieur moneybagz
Honestly it's probably because there are more government buildings in that part lol, we're equally poor generally
Thats still prestige-adjacent aha
Prestige of sharing space with tax wasting dumbasses maybe lol, it's very minor stuff though, nothing important going on there
Besides you being straightup dope 😎
Palm Springs CA is Dark Sky. It's cool.
When I lived at my old house, the interstate (a mile away or so) switched from sodium lights to LEDs and the light bleed was bad enough that I could have done precision yardwork at night. Even with blackout curtains, I could see the outline of my door at night. It was miserable.