My Crusade

I guess I'll start this blog with a personal statement. I grew up in a large metropolitan area in the Northeast, where a clear view of the night sky was out of the question. I remember getting a small telescope when I was a teenager, but due to poor optics and excessive light pollution I really never got any satisfactory views. As a result I quickly lost interest in exploring the night sky.

 Shortly after moving to Middle Georgia, however, I saw a complete constellation for the very first time (Orion), and I got to marvel at Saturn and Jupiter through the telescopes at the Museum of Arts and Sciences. During a vacation on Jekyll Island I was awestruck by my first view of the Milky Way. Who knew that this was actually something one could still see with one's own eyes!

These epiphanies aroused in me an interest in amateur astronomy. The more I learned about astronomy, the more fascinated I became with the vital role light plays in almost every aspect of our lives. And the more the neighborhood surrounding my house developed, the more acutely aware I became of the harmful effects of light pollution, especially when viewed from biological, ecological, economic, moral and spiritual perspectives.

Like most contemporaries I was oblivious to the ill-effects of wasteful lighting on my own property. Light pollution exists not because people do not care, but because they are simply not aware of its existence or its consequences. But any initiative for change has to start at home. I've become more sensitive to the issues of light pollution and light trespassing, and I do what I can to ensure that the lights around my house do not contribute to these two maladies. 

I'll finish this first post with a historical story and a contemporary illustration. Back in 1943, the astronomer Walter Baade made an exceptionally important discovery: Edwin Hubble had miscalculated the distance of other galaxies from our own and had thus proposed a completely lopsided image of the universe. Baade was able to correct Hubble's estimates because he could finally resolve the individual stars in the Andromeda Galaxy and its companions. And the only reason Baade was able to see things so clearly was because the city of Los Angeles cut its lights off after sundown in order to preclude an air assault by the Japanese air force. In other words, light pollution was eliminated completely during this period. Otherwise, we might have had to wait decades, if not centuries, for this crucial insight into the cosmos. (Source: Ken Croswell, The Universe at Midnight, 50).

Now, the illustration: This is what Canadian photographer Tom Carlson could see from his neighborhood one evening during a power outage. Notice the wisps of nebulosity revealing the Milky Way:

Once power was restored, he immediately took a picture from the same location. Notice the garish light trespassing in the lower right:

True: a picture is worth a thousand words.