Category Archives: light pollution

'Casts, astrocast.tv, light pollution, our night sky, stargazing

July Stargazing and Dark Skies

Leave a comment

What’s Up Now

While you’re still digesting the last post about galaxies, let’s do a little stargazing. It’s one of the few free things you can go out and do without a lot of equipment. In fact, all you need are your eyes, some warm clothes, a place away from bright lights, and the willingness to simply gaze at the sky awhile.

I do a monthly skygazing video for Astrocast.TV, and you can watch it here to find out the highlights of July’s observing.

 

 

Milky Way Galaxy
The Milky Way Galaxy as seen from a wildness area in West Virginia in a time-exposure photograph. Because of light pollution, many people have never seen this sight. http://www.ForestWander.com [CC-BY-SA-3.0-ul], via Wikimedia Commons
Lately at our house, we’ve been getting a lot of stormy weather late in the afternoon into the evenings. So, the stargazing hasn’t been great. But, when it IS clear, especially right after sunset, I like to look at Venus, hanging low on the western horizon for a little while after the Sun goes down. After it gets plenty dark, then I look for the Big Dipper, which is starting to dip lower into the northern sky as the year progresses. If it’s really dark out, and I live in a fairly dark-sky area, I look for the Milky Way. It’s a bit easier to see late at night, since it will be running almost right overhead, from the north-northeast to the south. It kind of looks like a cloud, but it’s really a huge agglomeration of stars, gas, and dust—our galaxy, as seen from the inside.

“Losing the Dark”

The Milky Way, along with a great many other celestial sights that we used to take for granted seeing is largely disappearing from our view due to excessive light pollution, particularly in the cities. Even where I  live, light pollution isn’t completely cut off by the mountains that lie between me and the nearest big city. Still, I can see the Milky Way, and I think that everybody should be able to see it.

This is why I got involved with the International Dark-Sky Association as a member, and now I serve as a member of the group’s Education Committee. I also spent last year working on a video for the group that can be used by anybody who wants to reach out and help mitigate problems of light pollution. It’s available free of charge in “flatscreen” HD format from the IDA, and also as a free download for most fulldome and all classic planetariums from Loch Ness Productions.

The IDA is the premier light-pollution mitigation advocacy group in the world. Their Web page is chock full of useful tips and information about helping to ease the scourge of light pollution. Their goal is to advocate for wise use of lighting, and many communities are starting to see the advantages of wisely deploying lighting, staying safe, but preserving the health of humans and wildlife as well as returning our starry skies to us.

Stargazing is a sublime pleasure in life. People have been doing it throughout history, and astronomy was our first science. In a very real sense, if and when you go stargazing this summer, you will be extending our historical interest in the skies. Plus, it’s just an inspiring and interesting thing to do. So, get out there and check out the skies!  And, come back and share your experiences in comments!  (I moderate comments, but I check every day and I will share any useful and germane comments you write.)

astronomy, light pollution

What if We Couldn’t See the Stars?

Leave a comment

Help GLOBE at Night 2013 Count the Stars

What is your life without the stars? Think about it? What if you couldn’t see the stars?   Can you step outside at night and see the Milky Way? Is your view hindered by light pollution? Can you see any stars from your home? For many people, particularly in large cities, the answers to those last two questions are abysmal: “Yes, light pollution affects my view of the sky” and “I can see only a few stars in the sky at night.”  It’s a worldwide problem, and with the astronauts’ abilities to send back pictures of Earth almost real-time, we can really see what our planet looks like as we light up outer space.

The good folks at the GLOBE at Night campaign want to know what your skies look like. GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program that encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky. During five select sets of dates in 2013, you can help the project by matching the  appearance of a constellation (Orion or Leo in the northern hemisphere, and Orion and Crux in the southern hemisphere) with seven star charts of progressively fainter stars (www.globeatnight.org/observe_magnitude_orion.html).Then, you submit your findings to the www.globeatnight.org/webapp/ , providing the date, time and location of your observations. You can submit from your iphone or computer, and your data will help make an  interactive map of all worldwide observations (www.globeatnight.org/map/). Over the past 7 years of 10-day campaigns, people in 115 countries have contributed more than 83,000 measurements, making GLOBE at Night the most popular, light pollution citizen-science campaign to date (www.globeatnight.org/analyze.html). The GLOBE at Night website is easy to use, comprehensive, and holds an abundance of background information (www.globeatnight.org/learn.html and www.globeatnight.org/observe.html). Guides, activities, one-page flyers and postcards advertising the campaign are available at www.globeatnight.org/pdf/. Through GLOBE at Night, students, teachers, parents and community members are amassing a data set from which they can explore the nature of light pollution locally and across the globe. The remaining GLOBE at Night campaigns in 2013 are: March 3 – 12, March 31 – April 9, and April 29 – May 8. Make a difference and join the GLOBE at Night campaign!

In other night sky light-pollution news, last week we (a team comprising Loch Ness Productions and the International Dark-SkyAssociation) released a video called Losing the Dark. It presents the issues related to light pollution and some easy-to-implement solutions to the problem. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below.  If you’re a planetarium person, you can get this video for your dome free of charge at the Loch Ness Productions Losing the Dark Web page. If you’re an educator, public speaker, outreach specialist, or dark-sky advocate, you can get a flat-screen HD version of the video at the International Dark-Sky Association’s Losing the Dark page.  It’s been a major hit so far, and we’d like to see it get out to as many folks as possible. Help spread the word about mitigating light pollution!