Light Pollution Is Taking Away Our Night Skies

[CentaurZ]

HuffPost: Light Pollution

[JamesF]

An interesting piece.

James

[Aramcheck]

I find it quite scary how light pollution is largely ignored, when there is a large body of evidence in scientific journals on the impact on wildlife and flora. I'm also wondering about how much our ability to view the stars has influenced our view (groan) over time of our place in the universe & the advancement of science in general. If we lived on a world that had always been light-polluted to the extent that the night sky was merely a dimmer version of daytime a lot of things may have been different. We might still be thinking the Earth is flat... No GPS, no mobile phone cameras (cccd), no wi-fi... Our calendar and even the days of the week would be different.

At least with light pollution the negative effects on the environment are easy to fix with just a flick of a switch... which is a damn sight easier than a lot of the other stuff!

[Jiggy 67]

Scary stuff, it’s always amazed me how much artificial light we produce through the night for no apparent reason, in places where people don’t actually go, whether it be street lights on deserted streets at 2am or factories and offices that are lit when nobody is present. Not only does it spoil things for amateur astronomy but it costs the nation a fortune and harms the environment. If you were to look at a satellite image of Manchester at 2am probably 80% of those lights are serving no purpose, sorry yes they are, they are filling the pockets of the energy companies and melting the ice caps