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What did you think of this Episode? Text Us!
This month, host Bill McGeeney is joined by Jared Flesher, director of Dark Sacred Night, and Bill Green of the Philadelphia Moon Men and Brussels Lunatics. Learn more at LightPollutionNews.com.
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Like what we're doing? For the cost of coffee, you can become a Monthly Supporter? Your assistance will help cover server and production costs.
Light pollution news August 2023. Fireflies rise up. This month, big changes in store as incandescent lights bite the dust. Light at night is showing to reduce estrogen levels. Ever want to go to a star party with a drag show? Is unicellar the answer? And what on earth is going on at the Arizona border Bonus? This month, we share a preview of Jared Flescher's recent video Dark Sacred Night. All this and much, much more on this month's Light Pollution News. Welcome to Light Pollution News. I'm your host, bill McGeaney. We're back at it Until late this month. I apologize, I was away on vacation. However, that doesn't mean we skimped in anyway. It's a full house tonight and I'm very excited to have with me today two excellent co-hosts. This is a truly excellent lineup, folks. First, let me welcome Bill Green, the other half of the filled-off in Moon Men. You may recall we had Brendan Lapp a few months back. He was the Philly based Moon man. But, bill, you're not based in Philly, right? You're in Brussels.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. So I just finished up my master's degree in Photonics Engineering. I did some research and collaboration with the lighting company Schrader, and we looked at ways to reduce the stray light in their luminaires. So that's how I got over here. But I'm the other half of the Philly Moon man, and we're starting Street Astronomy projects in cities in Europe too. We have a group here that we call the Brussels Lunatics, and the idea is still the same. They bring telescopes to very unexpected places and we try to connect people with the night sky there.
Speaker 1:Sounds excellent. How's the turnout and how's the reception been?
Speaker 2:It's really incredible. This summer we partnered with an art collective to go to some of their techno parties, so these were all night events until six in the morning, hundreds of people dancing, and then they'd come outside and we had a tenant in Stabsend pointed at Saturn's rings. In my opinion, that's just how else can you experience that? I think we brought a lot of joy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember when Brandon was on the experience that he puts on down South Street. It's a similar mode, right, it's kind of after hours Catches people going between places, going between bars and whatnot and they get to see really cool, cool nighttime sights in the sky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly like you say. It's this after hours experience. I've worked with a lot of astronomers doing a lot of astronomy outreach and it's always fun to go to the observatory. It's always something special for me and, I'm sure, for anyone who goes. But those people are already interested enough to turn up at a museum and turn up at an observatory. So we're kind of like the gateway drug. You can get a little bit of a taste of the night sky and then hopefully we can send you to somewhere with real equipment to get the rest of the story.
Speaker 1:Well, the other half of the panel today is going to be Jared Flesher. And Jared, I first came across your work in the short video Dark Sacred Night. I had no idea that you were the New Jersey leading environmental documentarian. It's pretty exciting stuff. Why don't you tell me a little bit about this?
Speaker 3:All right well.
Speaker 1:Bill, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so I am a documentary filmmaker and I do a lot of my work in New Jersey and much of it is on environmental subjects. I think probably New Jersey doesn't strike most people as a mecca of environmental filmmaking, but one thing that makes it interesting is we're a really crowded place. We kind of have that reputation for being a little crowded, a little dirty. We are the nation's most densely populated state, but what that means is that we see a lot of environmental problems that have to do with overpopulation and population density first or most intensely, and that includes light pollution.
Speaker 3:I think New Jersey is probably one of the most light polluted places in the country, right between Philadelphia and New York. I read that maybe DC takes the crown right now, but I bet New Jersey is right up there. So the reason I'm here today is within the last year I produced and released a short documentary called Dark, sacred Night, which features a Princeton University astrophysicist, gaspar Backos, who has become kind of a local champion and advocate for really just common sense solutions to reducing light pollution and bringing back the night sky. So we put that film out and we went to some film festivals around New Jersey and did some local screenings, trying to get people interested excited about this topic and then we put it online.
Speaker 3:And I should say by no means am I an expert on light pollution, but while I was making the film I really dove in and, like someone, who doesn't know?
Speaker 3:a lot about a topic and then you learn as much as you can, as quickly as you possibly can, and then my goal and what I do is try to communicate that to the public in a way to get them interested and hopefully take some action as well. And the goal is real positive change, really big change, but sometimes it's just change at a personal level as well.
Speaker 1:How was the feedback when you showed this movie to different festivals and stuff?
Speaker 3:Some of the feedback is very gratifying. One woman wrote me an email afterwards and she said since I watched this film I never really looked up all this much, but me and my husband have been obsessed with trying to find dark places and see the night sky.
Speaker 3:And that's just one person but, it's tough to really even change one person sometimes. So if you can reach that, that means that the film resonated in some way. We have also. We brought people together in the same room to get them talking about this issue. We did a screening with the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club and there's some legislation floating around in New Jersey that would in certain ways make the state do some better things for public lighting when they pay for a project and we brought some people together and we're trying to get some, maybe energy behind that effort and then something that was kind of exciting is Gaspar.
Speaker 3:He's the real expert and he's an astrophysicist. After we put out the film, he ended up on StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson the astrophysicist and we got some shout outs on that show, which was kind of cool, and a lot of views after that. I think that's one of our target audiences people who care about astronomy and physics and the night sky. So the film is up on YouTube now if anybody is listening to this and they want to watch it the easiest way to find it is.
Speaker 3:Just go into the YouTube search bar and type in dark sacred night. It should be one of the first search results. There's also a book that somebody wrote that has nothing to do with light pollution or night sky, called Dark Sacred Night. But don't click on that one. Click on the one with the picture of the night sky. That looks like a documentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a great film and if it's okay, hugh Jarrett, I'm going to show about a minute of it, or at least have the audio of a minute of it here in the show later down the road.
Speaker 2:Great show Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So how about we start things off? We got a pretty big episode this week, so, or just month, so how about we start things off? Let's start off with the big news this week Comes to us from Forbes Say goodbye to incandescent light bulbs. Love it or hate it, with some exceptions, leds are becoming the light of the land. On Tuesday, august 1st, the Department of Energy implemented their long entertained rules under the belief that a full switchover to LEDs will reduce overall energy costs by three billion dollars, which would result in the carbon emission savings of about 220 million metric tons.
Speaker 1:Historically, consumers understood wattage as a corollary for brightness. Higher wattage also held a check in excess lighting, as higher wattage meant more expensive electric bills. However, now consumers must deal with new terms like lumens, a lack of uniformity in product development, led color rendering notoriously varies between models, questionable LED recycling standards driven by questionable LED manufacturing standards. I think it's easy to see how all of this can go wrong. We already witnessed many situations where users of exterior LEDs don't understand their impact on not just the environment, but on their neighbors. New lights are almost universally excessively bright and do not consider things like circadian rhythms, so someone walked me off the ledge here. How do we see this turning out? I just do not see this push to full LEDs, under which I completely understand for trying to make a world a decarbonated place. I don't see it turning out well for night.
Speaker 3:I think. I would start by saying, as someone who uses lights for my video production work, I've probably spent way too much money in my life on lighting of various sorts. It's hard to overstate what a revolution LED lighting was. When I started, you would carry these big, heavy, hot lights Sometimes they were halogen, sometimes they were another technology into a room and they were really, really hot. I think that's where a lot of the wasted energy was going into waste heat.
Speaker 3:But, you're one you have to worry about burning down the room you're in because they're so hot if they touch anything like the drapes, then your subject is sweating and these things are heavy.
Speaker 3:You need two vans to carry them all in. Then LED lights come around. Now, when I go to a video shoot, I just have these little small, thin disc shaped lights. I can plug them if I need to, but really they just run off of lithium ion batteries. It's totally changed the game. The technology, from that standpoint, is really excellent. There's anywhere from 75% to 90% more efficient than the old incandescent light bulbs. The problem is, as I see it, like many things, human behavior. You get something new and wonderful that makes things cheaper and better. Instead of using this technology wisely, by and large people just turn up the lights 75 to 90%. That's the problem. It's a human behavior problem that the technology enables.
Speaker 1:Do they even know they're turning up the lights? Do they even realize it when they go out and buy a light bulb, an LED light bulb? Do people actually make that connection between how bright and so our traditional understanding will be based on an incandescent light and the certain wattage level? You say, all right, this is going to be 90 watt light bulb. I know how bright that's going to be. But lumens I don't know if people have a concept of what a lumen is.
Speaker 3:I don't know how much your average consumer thinks about that aspect of lighting, but I think a city that is putting up lights either on the streets or on the sidewalks, they know how much they pay for lighting and they have probably a better understanding of what they're getting and what they're doing.
Speaker 3:They say well we could raise the lights and still save some money. And then they do it. I think they're probably aware of what they're doing. I think and I'm sure you talk about this a lot on your show people still associate lighting with safety and with positivity. The more light, the better. The challenge and one of the reasons I made this film, one of the reasons I made the film is because, as far as the astrophysicists turned me on to the issue, his passion came through and convinced me in some of my work that this was a project I wanted to take on. Humans are really used to thinking that more light at night equals safety and good things. That is the educational challenge of trying to change that assumption.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if I can chime a little bit on that and describe what a luminous is, so there's a lot of different quantities that get thrown around, and so I went back and they said, okay, let's give people an idea of what is. If this was as inefficient as an incandescent bulb, what wattage would it be equivalent to? And so now you have these three things instead of two things, which makes the picture more complex. A lumen is basically the brightness of one candle or the energy emitted by one candle, and so I just always think back to this.
Speaker 2:We did a lot of things by candlelight for a very long time, and now, if you go in the standards, we're talking about three or 500 lumens per square meter on a desk just levels that are hundreds of times brighter than what we actually are. We really need to work. So I think, yeah, every episode that we do, unlike pollution news, we probably talk a little bit about the rebound effect. So people are going to go out to the store, they're going to buy a lamp that fits in the same socket. It's going to save them some energy and it's going to be brighter, and this is seen as a trade-off that everyone is going to find a positive to.
Speaker 2:I, jared, I really love the story you tell us about the revolution of LED lighting in film making, because there are a lot of benefits.
Speaker 2:Right, we wouldn't push technology forward if there wasn't, but I still think it's a tool in our toolbox. Like, for example, if you get up in the night and you want to use the toilet or go get a glass of water, you're going to walk through your home and turn a few lights on, because what light would you want in that situation? If it's purely an LED, then maybe maybe you've got the right color temperature, maybe those are a nice warm red glow at night, but still, what can't beat it in terms of keeping your your melatonin cycle activated in, in terms of staying sleepy, an incandescent bulb is just that really dim red color that you want for that situation. And if you're only turning the light on for a minute or two anyway, then then is energy efficiency for one light bulb for one minute? I don't even think it's a factor. So I do think it's a shame that we're losing that tool in the toolbox.
Speaker 3:You know I've shown the film in, you know, five or six theaters faces around New Jersey at least this point and had a lot of online feedback at all and you know one of the things you always do after the film is you have a talk and people inevitably ask you know, what can I do?
Speaker 3:And they've already seen in the film what they could do. But you know, they kind of want you to tell them again. And the number one thing I always say is you know, take all your outside lights and probably your inside lights too. And if they say 5000K on them or 3000K on them. Go to the store and get a light bulb that's 2700K or 2200K. That's much warmer and the vast majority of the people in these audiences and these are somewhat self-selected.
Speaker 3:These are people who went to an environmental film and somehow care about this issue. Anyway, I've not given even the slightest amount of thought to the color temperature of their light bulb. So I think I think there's a. In a certain sense it's a positive in that I think there's a really long runway to educate people about this issue and do simple things that will improve.
Speaker 3:Like you know, there is something really beautiful and wonderful about an old incandescent light bulb, but I have some 2000K LED light bulbs at home that look really warm and really cozy and they're almost so warm. They're funky, but you know, they're nice too.
Speaker 1:I don't think the LED technology is necessarily.
Speaker 3:I don't see a lot of drawbacks to it other than the fact that it is so darn efficient. Really and there's a corollary that I have at least read about that when gas gets cheaper, people drive more and they buy bigger vehicles, and I think that's kind of what we're looking at right now. Lighting just got a lot cheaper, so they're buying bigger lights and using them more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, jared, when you're a point with the lights, I use red night lights in rooms at night which you don't notice if your eyes aren't dark adapted. So when you wake up you have to go to the bathroom and get some water. You know the room is illuminated with an LED, like a warm LED, a low-lumen red light, and it's perfect. You can see everything, get around no problem. So that's an excellent use case. But then on the other end, jared, you're saying about, you know, having a bigger car and using more of it, and we had an article on a couple months back where lumens are coming. It was a professor over in California who believes that we're just at the very tip of an iceberg when it comes to lighting everything. And one of the things I saw the other day and here in Philadelphia we have a really big urban park and they built really, really expensive homes along the one side, on the outside of the home, they're actually embedding vanity lights on the wall of the home and I can see that being more of a thing. The more you know, the cheaper it is, the easier it is to put in. You know it's going to require probably, you probably don't need as much time and effort to put in these lights. No, I can see it going both ways, but hopefully we all become a little better educated on, you know, say, the color and the at the lumen level and don't really, at the very least, piss off our neighbors as much.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the next big story I saw this month was an article from the Daily Beast the next pandemic might occur because it's too bright out, and it's written by Tony Hothron. And Tron did something really interesting that I thought. In this piece he associated light pollution with noise pollution. Tron interviewed Erica Walker, who detailed the problem of noise pollution she experienced, namely how an upstairs neighbor's noise affected her to the point that she actually took legal action to take care of the nuisance.
Speaker 1:In a similar way to how nuisance, noise pollution elevates stress, hormones and health concerns in individuals, tron states. While it may not seem like much, our ability to see the stars in light is actually a pretty good indicator of not only the overall health of a city but also its surrounding ecosystem. Tron goes on to make the case of how light pollution is on par with other pollutions and notes that the United States Environmental Protection Agency did have an office of noise abatement that was actually shuttered, never to return, by President Reagan. So do you think Tron made a good case for light pollution as an environmental pollutant? Where do we stand on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I know that from a legal perspective, light pollution is not considered a pollutance and we still struggle even to quantify. If we were going to regulate, what are the numbers we're going to use for that? Over here in Europe there was just a big grant awarded for a collaborative project where a few conservationists they're going to take on light pollution and noise pollution together. So the thinking is already there that the light is in the air, the noise is in the air, and considering it as an aspect of air pollution is a way to work things into the legal framework.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting that's considering it as an aspect of air pollution too, because they already have legislation on the books that they can just kind of bind it to.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly so there's when we think of air pollution, we think of particles in the air and there are set limits on that and there's enforcement power behind that. So getting these things considered as a part of air pollution, that's one way to go.
Speaker 1:What do you think people would not consider light pollution as an actual pollutant?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a bit different in nature, in my opinion, from other pollutants. We think of pollutants as being dirty, just having some kind of let's put it this way, it's more eco-friendly to ship something from Poland on a gasoline truck that it is to ship it from around the world on an electric boat. So our ideas of what is eco-friendly don't always line up with the laws of physics. When you add up all the numbers, and it's the same way, a photon is not something. You can't measure. How many photons are in the air? There's no meter for that. That works for every situation. But it is easier to think about a particle or a sludge or a smog making our environment less beautiful, whereas I think we could argue that light does have this aspect of enhancing the beauty of many of the places we're polluting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my sense and my hope is that we are in the very early days of defining what light pollution is and bringing that idea to the public, if viewers or listeners do get a chance to watch Dark Sacred Night.
Speaker 3:Gaspar Bakos, the astrophysicist, makes a point towards the end of the film that for 100 years or more, london was covered in smog, apart from the coal-fired power plants that were right in the city, and people accepted it for a long time, until the day they didn't. And now London is not covered in smog anymore. The whole planet, or much of it, is now covered in light pollution and people pretty much just accept it, but hopefully one day that can change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good analogy right there. Well, let's keep moving on, because we got lots covered this show. But how about this? Here's something interesting out of China. According to the state news agency, in China, a new trend has emerged. Whereas in previous years, driven by robust economic growth, young people migrated and drove to the big cities, now it appears that they are returning to those same small towns with the hopes of seeing stars and enjoying the natural night. From the story across China, dark Sky Industry delivers bright future for village. We learn of how the community of Chong Hong set out to create a stargazing resort in 2016. The article attributes 30,000 visitors a year to Astro Tourism, whereas the previously impoverished community is now witnessing revitalization.
Speaker 1:It stars embody more than just the sky. Star-related concepts extend to star-themed village clusters and to bookstores, bazaars and even street lamps. In a similar vein, western Ontario's Sheffield Conservation Area showcases more than just great trails and paddling. The area is actually home to a Dark Sky viewing area and friends. This by no means is modest. The LNA Dark Sky viewing area features solar-powered, supplied electrical outlets for observers, an opaque barrier fence to prevent vehicle light from directly shining in, and more. It originally opened in 2012 as pretty much a glorified concrete slab and now a facility plans to add a large telescope's aid in public viewing events.
Speaker 1:You'll want to also mark your calendars for the next event we're going to talk about here staying in Canada. Did you know? One of my very favorite places, jasper National Park in these spectacular Canadian Rockies, hosts a Dark Sky Festival every autumn. The agenda typically includes science talks, planetarium shows, solar-observing model rocket launches. But wait, there's much more. And this year it's going to include First Nation Native Dancers, a drag queen named Cedar T, a drone show and Native American stories from the Indigenous Kree people.
Speaker 1:And then, swinging back to the States, as we wrap up a little Astro Tourism walkthrough, here we see similar events, just more stoic nature. Shenandoah has a Night Sky Festival on August 11th, great Basin has an event going on on September 14th and Joshua Tree rounds out the events in October 13th. Hopefully everything's all right for that event on October 13th and that Joshua Tree Night Sky Festival has the added bonus of overlapping with the annual Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse this year, which is pretty cool. So these all appear to be very interesting, clever ways to engage folks in a forgotten half of the day and, bill, you have a lot of experience working with the public. Do events like this actually build awareness and interest? Do you find that it grows, or why don't you tell me a little bit about that experience?
Speaker 2:People are always inspired by the Night Sky, and that can range from just a little wow to wanting to know more about light pollution to wanting to get involved and learn how to use a telescope themselves. Something that's a little different about the way that street astronomers do things is that we focus primarily on having a really low barrier to entry. So, for example, I would have loved to go to Cherry Creek State Park. It is really just a national treasure of a place, but it's also an eight hour drive from Philadelphia. I don't drive personally. I've met people in our outreach who have never left the city in their entire life, and so that kind of opened up my mind. There's this real problem of access. So if you can reach people where they are, they didn't even know how interested they were. And yeah, the people who have never looked through a telescope before, those are the people who stick around all night and keep asking wonderful questions.
Speaker 1:Do you find you ever have repeat offenders come up to you and want to see stuff?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, all the time People who just pass us by, by chance or in a different location, they see us again. And last time we looked at the creators on the moon, this time we can look at Jupiter's moons, or even people. They want us to. They have a telescope at home but they don't quite know how to use it and, yeah, we try to teach what we can. We really just try to listen to what people want. How do they want to engage with astronomy? And then how can we accommodate that?
Speaker 1:And Jared, you said that you're engaging with folks all the time, especially at the end of any movie showings. Have you witnessed a moment like much of your audience is usually going to be self-selective which makes sense, because you're making a movie and the people are going to seek it out, are usually already kind of in that mindset. But do you ever come across folks who have never touched any of these subjects? Or I'm curious about how, what their response is and what your engagement has been with them?
Speaker 3:Sometimes at a screening especially at a film festival where they program a bunch of different films together you get people in the audience who probably didn't come for the light pollution film, but they watch it and some of the responses I mentioned people say I started looking at the night sky, or I at least looked up for the first time in a past year.
Speaker 1:But sometimes the other responses.
Speaker 3:I've heard from Dark Sacred Night and these are gratifying as well are people who want to do the right thing but don't really know what to do, and they hear that they could go home and they could change their light bulb, either to get one that's less bright, different color temperature, or they'll tell me something like they'll email me and say I bought a light that has a motion sensor, so we're not just keeping the light on all night anymore.
Speaker 1:Because now I feel guilty about that.
Speaker 3:So it just goes on when a raccoon walks past. Change is really hard. It's hard to change systems and it's even hard to change an individual human behavior, but when? I get a dozen or two dozen emails like that that makes me think that more people who watched the film probably hopefully did the same thing, and that there's a lot more people out there who, if they were educated about this issue in any way either from watching my film or listening to your podcast or anything they would do the right thing.
Speaker 3:Making people in this noisy, meaty environment we have is one of the great challenges that I see, and I think it's only going to get more challenging. I want to go back real quick to the topic of astrotourism, because I kind of have a personal story. That's meaningful to me is that when my wife and I went on our honeymoon, we were talking about where we could go and we both kind of like national parks and I said, honey, let's go to Utah. And she said, okay, we'll go to Utah.
Speaker 3:And the reason I wanted to go to Utah, in addition to seeing all those cool national parks, is because I knew it's one of the darkest places in the continental US you could go.
Speaker 3:I remember it specifically going to I think it was Natural Bridges National Monument really dark out there, sleeping out in a tent, setting the alarm for 2 AM and opening the tent and looking up and letting my eyes get accustomed when I was seeing and there aren't many things in life that truly take your breath away, or at least that truly take my breath away.
Speaker 3:But for someone who's never seen the night sky properly, really really how it looks in a dark place, it's breathtaking and it's spiritual and it's potentially religious and it's just really really cool and a lot of people don't have access to that experience. I've rarely had access to that experience because I live in New Jersey. I can't look up and see the night sky, but it's unforgettable and I think if you could somehow get more people out there and if you see it once and you know how it's supposed to look, that's a really effective way to make people care about this issue and all environmental issues, I would say, because I don't know if you've had this experience, but when I look up at the night sky in Utah and I see a billion stars, it makes me feel very small but part of something really huge.
Speaker 3:In a way that is kind of like mind stretching and it makes me kind of care about connections and other people and other places and all that.
Speaker 1:And I think that's all pretty cool. I want to ask you, Jared and Bill, what age were you when you first saw the Milky Way?
Speaker 2:I'll let you know when it happens.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:I've grown up on the East Coast all my life I don't drive, so my ability to leave the city is really limited. Here again, I'm in the same situation in Brussels. It's one of the most like polluted cities in the EU, so I've made more than one journey out to a dark sky site, but I still need to worry about the clouds. And well, I'll get there one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Jared, how about you?
Speaker 3:Growing up in New Jersey, my family, we didn't travel a ton but we did go on vacation sometimes. But we always went to vacation in Florida, where I had some uncles, to the Miami area. So going from New Jersey to Miami I still wouldn't see the night sky. So the first time I really remember looking up and kind of being amazed by the stars and the Milky Way was I think in high school I took a trip to Vermont and kind of got like way up there and wasn't even thinking about looking at the stars.
Speaker 3:That wasn't the point of it, but just kind of going outside at night and being like wait, holy crap, what's different? So that's really the first time, probably in high school, when I saw the Milky Way and even saw the night sky properly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's excellent. People don't realize that you kind of have to wait a little longer after dark to see it, so it's a really catch it. I mean, for me it was when I was 28, the first time I saw the Milky Way. I had seen stars, but I never actually saw the cloud, the actual cloud of the Milky Way, and it was like a game changer and I kept trying and kept trying and then one day I was able to actually find it. I was always be cloudy every other time. But then for my wife she's, her family is up in Vermont and they have, like you, look out their door at night, it's, the Milky Way is always there. I'm like, oh wow, this must be nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one more thing I want to add about this is I think I'm the youngest person on the show today and that means the situation is probably a little bit different just from just from you, to me, and in the span of five or 10 years, I think things have radically changed. I was watching Carl Sagan's cosmos recently and there's a scene where he's in a classroom of students in Brooklyn and he's telling them how, yeah, I remember when, when I grew up in Brooklyn, on some really clear nights, I could see the Milky Way, and this was just shocking to me, because we're talking about maybe the 1960s one of the biggest cities in the world you could still see the Milky Way from the center of New York, and of course, we know that's impossible now, but, yeah, just to contemplate how much things may have changed in just just our generation.
Speaker 1:Excellent point, bill. That's really an excellent point. And piggybacking on that, there's article from Axios that they mapped out how far it is for anyone in the US to actually find a dark sky. So wouldn't you know it that New Jersey congratulations, jared Connecticut and Rhode Island have the longest distance to go, but then if you're up in Maine, utah and Hawaii, you pretty much can find a Milky Way without traveling too far, and in Maine, heck, most spots you can just look outside. It is it is, bill, to your point Like I know, when I grew up I could see, you know, I could see plenty of stars, and that's what got me into astronomy is the fact that as a kid, like my backyard, it was pretty easy to see stars. But I don't think that area is as. I think the skies are much brighter now, you know, and that's been about 20 years. So is what it is there, you know? I guess that's progress, I don't know. Well, let's move over to the hobbyist side of things.
Speaker 1:An article from Digital Camera World says do not paint with light when photographing at night. Jamie Carter is waving his finger at you light polluting astrophotographer. Places where light painting is now banned include arches, canyon lands, hovenweep, natural bridges, yosemite and the Grand Tetons. Now, before you jump to conclusions about your rights, take a second to imagine the scenario You're headed out to photograph the night sky in one of these great, amazing parks and some other photographer takes it upon themselves to light up your frame. Irrespective of your considerations, carter posits an additional reason to simply be courteous. Light painting actually affects nocturnal animals, including kangaroo rats, wood rats, ringtails, foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, bats and owls, only to name a few, say. Carter suggests a simple solution to capture your foreground. So why not use blue hour or one of the more bright and lunar phases as an alternative to create a natural light in your shot without over saturation? Jared, I know you do a ton of camera work. What's your experience? Nighttime photography? Have you done any of this light painting? Have you ever had a chance to do it?
Speaker 3:When you were out in Utah recently, or maybe you know, I've seen and I'm in all of some of the really excellent astrophotography and astro cinematography.
Speaker 1:My own experience is relatively limited.
Speaker 3:There are some really nice astrophotography photos in the film Darksaker night but most of those came from Gaspar and remote places like Australia now back and various places in Africa and Chile. There's this one really cool shot he has where there's actually like a bonfire in the foreground or a little campfire and he's way out on I think it's like a Mesa and you can see him. A cool shot if you watch the film.
Speaker 2:I pointed my camera up a few times and filmed the stars going around.
Speaker 3:But I did have an interesting Photography project that came up because of the film. Someone saw it in Princeton, new Jersey, not too far from where I live, and the very last shot in the film is a field full of lightning bugs or Fireflies, some people call them just blinking on and off. And this woman figured out who I was and contacted me and she said I have the best yard for lightning bugs and I want to hire you to take some really cool photos for me. And you know I wouldn't. I'm definitely an expert in this either, but I kind of looked up some of the techniques for Effective lightning bug photography and you know what it is is probably all the things you would guess is one a really fast lens.
Speaker 3:So I think I I got 50 millimeter f 1.2, you put your camera on a tripod. You don't just want an empty field of bugs, because then it could be an empty field of bugs anywhere. So you do want something in the foreground. In this case this woman had some bird feeders and some little trees in front of the field. So I will admit that I did slightly light the foreground, the trees, to get a little, you know, visual interest, although I don't think the lightning bugs minded too much, and certainly there is no other astrophotographers there, so they were not pissed off, but something that the real experts do is they will stack photos right.
Speaker 3:So you don't just take one photo of lightning bugs in the field, as you take six or ten photos, maybe at like a one second or two second exposure each, and then you stack them all and it makes it looks like there's lightning bugs everywhere. So that's I practice in my backyard and I was like, yeah, that actually makes it look cooler, whether or not it's totally honest. Yeah, you know it's trickery, it's digital trickery, but it looks cool. So I went out there not knowing what to expect. This woman?
Speaker 3:told me she had like the greatest backyard for lightning bugs and I was like, well, we'll see. So I get there and the backyard's totally Overgrown. You know, in the little Princeton suburb she's let her lawn go to like native plants and wild and I go out there and it's eight o'clock and there's a few lightning bugs. But I hang out, I get set up. Nine o'clock comes and I have never seen so many. You know, lightning bugs come up out of the grass and I'm taking Incredible photos and in the end I didn't have to.
Speaker 3:I didn't even have to stack them, because in every shot I took there's, like you know, you can see 50 specks of light, and it was really cool and it turned out to be not super complicated when you have a good subject, like, apparently, this lady's backyard, and she paid me for it, which is which is the best thing of all, right. So I got to do something I kind of wanted to do anyway, and you get paid for it and, as I've heard and I've come to believe, that's kind of the. The trick to life is, if you get someone to pay you to do something you kind of want to do anyway, which is for me to go out and look at stars and, you know, shoot lightning bugs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right, I've done the stacking. We have a great spot here actually in the city of Philadelphia that is. It's a dark area that had the field has a ton of fireflies and it's. It's great and you can get in one frame and get a whole bunch on a good night. You know, depends on that night, right, you have to find that right night in June, but now one night you can get a whole bunch in one frame. But the stacking method actually is kind of cool too because, well, you notice with it. You notice the different species, right, the different colors and that's really cool to catch bill, have you had any experience doing any Well in this case?
Speaker 1:firefly photography? But if you do a strip of time, that's, that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my colleagues is getting me a little bit more into Insects because he studies the, the effects on on our our insect friends, and that is something I just learned recently that there are different colors, and not just that, but also different flight patterns for different species. So when you take a photo, you can, yeah, easily identify all the different critters flying around in there. That was something that fascinated me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very cool, jared.
Speaker 3:Yes, Well, yeah, that's something I definitely noticed when I was experimenting with stacking is that you know these single blocks of light where there is one species of lightning bug, but then there's this apparently other species that is making these Huge arcs through the sky or through the field, so that when you do, say, a two second exposure, you have this like huge street, whereas the other lightning bug right next to it is just this little, you know Small point of light.
Speaker 3:So I noticed the same thing and some of the things, the colors as well. For listeners out there who've never Done it and want to experiment, my experience was if you have access to Adobe.
Speaker 3:Photoshop and you follow like a simple, you know Google, a simple online instruction. Basically, photoshop does the work for you. You know, you pick what photos you want and it aligns them, it Stacks them intelligently and makes it look good. So it's it's probably not the technical wizardry that was once required to get these really cool shots. The software is pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, software is actually pretty excellent, now for it. I Agree with that. Well, how about we move on to something slightly similar, but not really? And, bill, I don't know if you've actually used any of these, considering you're in Brussels and to me seems like a layup for urban astronomy, but have any? You guys toy with the unisteller scopes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've actually. I saw them a little bit at a next bow, and so these things are really they're interesting devices, right. What they do is they have very good image processing software Good enough that you can perform that in real time and you don't have to go into Photoshop and do stacking afterwards. This is really meant to be a very user-friendly Experience, so that someone who has absolutely no knowledge at all could could go to a store and come home with a new hobby. So a lot of astronomers like it because it's very beginner friendly. They had recommended for beginners, but these telescopes they actually don't even have eyepieces on them, so there's no way to look through the telescope and in my opinion, it just seems like a harder way to Google astronomy photos.
Speaker 1:But it is interesting to claim from Unisteller is saying that they can cut through light pollution right, because they do on life stacking. It's essentially getting a camera instead of a telescope, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can do the slide stacking and and got a darker night sky that way, so you are taking a photo of something that's real, but there's an extra layer of separation there, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:You're a purist bill.
Speaker 2:I'm a visual astronomer 100%.
Speaker 1:Jared, have you seen these? These are cool, you know so when you sent the resource list for the show. This was new to me and I looked it up and I'm intrigued as an educational tool.
Speaker 3:Like I live somewhere, you know, middle of the farm field or there's some farms behind me where for New Jersey it's relatively speaking, kind of dark and I would like to learn my way around the night sky better. You know, I have a pair of binoculars and I've done that but without a guide, you know, it can be pretty challenging to find the stars you're looking for, especially, you know, once you move past.
Speaker 3:You know the big dipper and some of the other, you know real bright ones. So I'm kind of intrigued in that sense. But and it kind of as, as Bill mentioned, man looking through real optics and seeing something real is meaningful to me, although you know I do shoot digital cinematography instead of film. But you know I still listen to vinyl records at home, so I'm kind of that guy too. I kind of like the idea of looking through, you know, either real binoculars or a real telescope and, you know, really seeing, letting those photons that traveled, you know.
Speaker 1:However, many thousands of light years. That's the part that kind of makes me excited.
Speaker 3:I was like that light came from somewhere very, very far away and that's, that's cool. I want to see it. You know, not the, not the camera I'm looking through. I.
Speaker 1:Hear you, I still do visual. I do both. I do visual and Astro photography. I'm not good at astrophotography. That is like you need your own master's degree in astrophotography processing Just to be good at it. But visual is great, right.
Speaker 1:You find a nice good Dark spot somewhere, or even it doesn't even have to be that dark. Like Bill, you know, you do this in the cities. You find there's never a night. You don't want to look at Saturn Right, there's never a night. You don't want to look at Jupiter, like we're looking at some of the bright stuff. It's always fun and enjoyable look at seeing a transit go across Jupiter. But I feel like something like this might be great for the whole generation of people and, bill, to your point when you're talking about growth and age differences the whole generation of people that are growing up without any access to a Night sky at all. And, jared, you mentioned, like you know, if you can go out and see the environment, but people Are losing that ability just to see that environment. And this might be something where, if you know you're a, an outreach Organization where you're like a sign center, you know, like a natural history museum or something like that, you could actually use this as a way for your outreach.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree. Do you remember? This was years ago at this point, but that month where everyone was playing Pokemon Go on their phone do you kind of recall? That cultural moment. Yeah, you know what was amazing to me is that you know, there is biodiversity and amazing real-life animals out in places, you know, whether it's the park or in the woods, everywhere.
Speaker 3:People wouldn't go look at them, but you made it, you gamified it and you made fake creatures, you know somewhere, and people went out to see them, but the benefit was that they got off their butts and they went somewhere real, to a real location out in the natural environment to do it.
Speaker 3:And I think, when technology could do that, even if it's a bit of a you know charade, and I think if a telescope can get people or a telescope camera you know if that's what we're talking about can get people looking up and thinking about the night sky you know, it's kind of the gateway drug to the real thing, and I don't see how that could be anything but a good thing yeah.
Speaker 1:And birders have figured this out. Right, birders, you know this is. Birding has become much more gamified. Right, cause you have apps on your phone that tell you exactly that that bird is somewhere, cause it can hear the app or can hear the bird somewhere. And then people get their cameras out and you just see a whole bunch of people chasing this bird down with the camera and then they show their friends the bird. It's the same idea as, I believe, when you're talking about Jared.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 3:I know a few of these birders and you know having your lifelifts is the big thing, right, like I've seen 532 birds in my life or whatever, and you know I think the astronomy hobby could probably take some lessons from that. You know, if you want to bring new people in, considering that you know young people respond to stuff like this, you know, maybe if you can't see a certain star in Philadelphia, but you go to a certain place it's dark enough you see it. You add it to your star lifelist.
Speaker 1:Well, I will mention this. They have something called the astronomical league and I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but it is essentially kind of like a merit badge listing, so you complete these lists and you get like a certificate but the list. You don't have to complete the list if you don't want to, and the beauty of it is that someone's already compiled all of this, this information, for you to find, and it can be anywhere from very simple urban astronomy down to like very deep where you have to have like a 20 inch scope. But to Jared, this is exactly right, like they were able to package Pokemon Go and go the astronomical league, these kind of like a facelift right, it needs to be able to package its ideas, these cool little hunts you can go on, into something that's a little more tangible for modern generation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I'm definitely going to check out the list of the program you just mentioned because I think I'll want to go through that. But yeah, imagine if somehow you could get teenagers interested in the night sky because they're trying to work through their game and all of a sudden they're talking to their parents about light pollution. I mean, just imagine that would be fantastic.
Speaker 1:I hear you, okay. Well, this looks like a great time to take a breather. I think we've kind of been doing this. It's been great to have you guys on. This is a really fun show. I'd like to thank my guests today Bill Green, phil Duffy, moo man, practicing all the way from Brussels, and an award-winning journalist and environmental documentary maker, jared Flesher.
Speaker 1:Before we get going again, I wanted to remind you that anything spoken about on this show is available over at a website, lightpollutionnewscom. And hey, while you're out there, why not become part of the conversation? We have a Reddit page, r slash light pollution news and also regularly post questions over on LinkedIn. So just search for us over there and follow us at light pollution news. Maybe you're not a fan of the chatty engagement, not a problem. Follow us over on Instagram for some quick sound bites.
Speaker 1:Over at lightpollutionnews, we also run a show poll and question each month, available only to our listeners using Spotify. We are not paid in any way by Spotify. I do really like their options for the audience engagement, though, so the app actually has some cool little features that you can use for podcasts so you get to engage a little better with your audience. Check that out. Spotify doesn't want to pay me. I'm always up for it, so that would be really neat. Please lobby for that.
Speaker 1:Finally, if you like what we're doing, why not tell a friend or subscribe to the show? Wherever you get your podcasts? We appreciate your help in getting the word out. If you don't like what we're doing, why don't you tell your enemy? It's a win-win for us. Thank you once more, but before we move on here, I want to get back to the show, the video that we were talking about, jared, because you directed this brilliant storytelling piece, dark Sacred Night and, as you mentioned, you feature as your physicist guest of our Bacchus. Bacchus, I believe it's Bacchus, yeah, bacchus. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that? How was it working with Bacchus? Did you know Bacchus beforehand?
Speaker 3:I did a little bit. So first I should mention this film was produced by the Princeton University Office of Sustainability, who I work with often, and kind of how this project got started is it goes way back to the pandemic, actually Kind of when everything shut down.
Speaker 3:I was working for Princeton and the Office of Sustainability and they still want to communicate with students and members of the public, but nobody was going to class and everybody was kind of sitting at home. So kind of an email came in that there was this interesting astrophysicist at Princeton, gaspar Bacchus, who had set up trail cameras all around his property next to a lake in Princeton, kind of just to pass the time with his sons. And maybe you remember some of the news stories how when people started staying indoors all sorts of interesting animals you wouldn't see, like the mink and the foxes and bears all started kind of like taking over the town.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was deer down in Center City Philadelphia walking around.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. Gaspar started getting all this great footage with his sons around Princeton of these animals and kind of word got to me and I was looking to stay busy and I pitched the Office of Sustainability why don't I do a short film about this guy and kind of the natural world. So I got to know Gaspar and what I got to know about him was that he is really fun to be around, a really good scientific storyteller, and he's a really interesting and good astrophysicist. His kind of what he does is using ground based telescope and camera systems.
Speaker 3:He essentially watches the night sky and using these systems and I guess crunching the data discovers exoplanets finds things like supernovas, comets, things like that, and he's been part of teams that have discovered I think it's probably like well over 100 exoplanets now.
Speaker 1:So anyway, he does all these he does all these interesting things.
Speaker 3:And then he also, you know, films chipmunks in Princeton. That's what I made a short film about that. So I got to know Gaspar and I kept in touch with him.
Speaker 3:And the more I got to know him, the more I learned that he really cares about the light pollution issue and trying to educate people to do the right thing and make the skies darker for everyone, so more people have access to this thing that he loves, which is the night sky, and then he has learned more about, and through him, I began to learn more about it.
Speaker 3:You know light pollution isn't just whether or not you could see the stars. It has huge implications for ecosystems and wildlife, and increasingly scientists are realizing that there are implications for human health as well. Everything from diabetes to cancer to depression has in some way been linked to light pollution, although certainly, I think scientists are still studying and learning more about this. So I pitched my director at the Princeton office of sustainability to let's make a film about this, using Gaspar as kind of the main voice, and that was Shauna Weber, who was the producer of this film, and she gave it the green light.
Speaker 3:So again, I was able to do a project that I was pretty excited about and had some funding for it through Princeton, and so what you see was the collaboration of Gaspar and myself in the office of sustainability.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is a great film. I do have a question. Before we go, I'm going to show a clip here in a second. I do have a question Did you get to go to Chile and some of these other places in the video?
Speaker 3:Oh, I wish I had gone to Chile, so there's a scene early on in the film from I think it's the Los Campaneros Observatory in the. I think it's the Atacama Desert.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'm saying that. Right, that's right.
Speaker 3:And that footage came from another filmmaker.
Speaker 3:Her name is Allison McAlpine and I believe she's up in Montreal and she made a film about the Chilean dark sky and the meaning of the dark sky to that culture. And during the course of making that film she had interviewed and filmed Gaspar when he was down at the observatory. But I learned from Gaspar that footage didn't make the final cut for whatever reason, so it wasn't in her film. So I contacted her and she incredibly graciously made that footage available to my documentary, so that's why that's in there.
Speaker 1:So I didn't get to go to.
Speaker 3:Chile someday. But you know I did get to roam around the streets of Princeton at like 2 am with Gaspar looking at lights, good, bad and ugly and that's still a pretty good gig and was a lot of fun as well.
Speaker 4:All right, let's get some audio of the actual video here the end of the US has now lost the vision of the Milky Way. Light pollution has increased at least 50% in the past 25 years, but up to 400% in many places. One reason is actually conversion to LEDs. Leds are inexpensive now. They save energy. They're extremely bright. Now, instead of cutting back on the energy use, what was kept constant is the amount of money we pay for the energy or the amount of energy we waste, and lights were made 10 times brighter.
Speaker 1:I mean we are in dust. So, first of all, I'm not hearing that the sun is just setting and this is causing a glare.
Speaker 4:If you're driving out from this direction, there's a bright light shining in your eyes. It's actually helping anyone. First we need to define what light pollution is. It's the inappropriate or excessive amount of outdoor lighting, so light actually goes in every direction. At least half of this light then is totally wasted. It goes out into the clouds.
Speaker 1:Jared, I am in awe that you guys found a chalkboard.
Speaker 3:You know that was in Gaspar's dining room his house where he's got three boys who are, I think are in high school and middle school, and it's the kind of household where there are math equations written on the dining room chalkboard that I can't make any sense of, but you know that's what they do.
Speaker 1:That's great. Did he actually make music in this video?
Speaker 3:Oh, so he is credited in the credits for music. And what that is at the top of the observatory on the top of the hill in Chile, at Las Campanas, there's these rocks that ring. We actually have ringing rocks out in New Jersey as well. I don't know exactly what the structures that make them ring. But he was banging on them and played this nice percussive song that made it into the film. So I figured that's music, right. So he got a music credit Impressive video.
Speaker 1:Impressive video. I don't know, bill, if you have any thoughts. I thought great job. Definitely want everyone to watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, what I really like about that part you showed is just how simple the problem can really be. And yeah, maybe when you draw it on a chalkboard you can start to see the solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very, very simple, very to the point. Well, jared, thank you so much for showing us, for making that video. Let's continue along here because we're halfway through the show. I'm going to try and speed things up here. I'm kind of dragging, but I'm having such a good time with you guys that it's great. It's funny how fast this time can go.
Speaker 1:So this next one comes to us from Catalonia, specifically a press release from University of Barcelona. It appears that the university has undertaken a plan to balance human uses in the park with the ecological need, with the hopes of minimizing human impact. Light maintains a bright orange until it detects movement, whereby it turns white. I'm not quite sure why the light stays on at all, to be honest, but it is what it is. Last month, we had a French article where someone could control street lights from a phone app, and that same month, we also had to tell students being too scared to walk down a dim street because they thought it was not lit, whereby the lighting actually utilized motion sensors. So, bill, this seems up your alley. What's the answer for adaptive lighting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had a couple of experiences of feedback. I've had some feedback about these that I thought were interesting. When I first thought about it, I thought this could only be a good thing. People could only like this. This is one of those win-wins.
Speaker 2:But then there are some drawbacks, right, like, if none of the lights are on at all, then how would you know that there are going to be motion sensors that turn on? So you need to also implement it correctly and think holistically about how people will use the space, because if they don't know that there is lighting, that is just as good as there being no lighting. They won't go down that way. But wouldn't it be well done? It can be a huge advantage, and I think you've even talked about it with Brendan.
Speaker 2:I really carried this idea with me that if you are illuminated by a path, that's motion sensor, ideally the light that is right in front of you or right on top of you is the one that's on and everything else is off. So if someone else is there, another light will turn on from far away and you can see that much better than someone who comes up to you from a uniformly lit street. So there are examples of it being well done. There are examples where there is something left to desire and it takes a lot of attention and detail to get these installations right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder about. I love the idea that you can be able to you know if we are talking about security or safety. You will be notified just by the fact that the light turns on Right. That's kind of a nice little feature. Walking down a street A lot of people get concerned and you know they want to be able to see other individuals out there. Bill, do you think motion sensing lights will actually be a solution?
Speaker 2:Of course they're a part of the solution If we apply them blanket in all situations. Well, we need to trust the architects and the lighting designers to do a good job with these installations and think about how we're going to use them, and not just to check a box on the list, right?
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to continue on here talking about some circadian rhythms. I figured now would be a good time to discuss some potential human health impacts that made the news. Amy McDermott of PNAS wrote a piece identifying a connection between low female estrogen levels and prolonged exposure to bright light at night. Researchers in 2019 noticed that female mice with impaired estrogen cycling lost their circadian rhythm after exposure to light at night. So fast forward to 2023,. Researchers completed their work by using two experimental groups and a control set of mice 17 mice in each group. The two experimental groups received 24 hours of light for 64 days, while the control group received normal day dark cycle. Following the experiment, researchers examined parts of mice brains that control biological clock. It appears that the exposure to constant light directly negatively impacted estrogen levels of the experimental groups only. It's another piece of the puzzle and, Gerrit, to your point, the ecological impact of having lights actually affects people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, when I was researching the film, one of the resources I read was the book Darkness Manifesto by a Swedish ecologist. I don't know if you've talked about it on this show or not, but generally the thesis of the book which resonated with me is that most things that are alive on Earth evolved over a very long time in a situation where there is a cycle of light and darkness.
Speaker 3:So it's almost obvious that if you start taking darkness out of that, natural cycle, that natural rhythm, you're going to create all these problems that you can't even imagine. And, as the science is catching up, based on what I've seen, scientists are starting to realize that, yeah, when you take darkness out of the equation, there's all sorts of negative consequences that we don't fully understand yet.
Speaker 1:Bill, you're in one of the brightest places on Earth. How do people feel about the constant drone of lights at night?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Brussels. All of the European institutions are headquartered here, so it brings in a lot of people from all over the world who move to the city from all over the world and then compare it to their experience back home. A lot of people are coming from places that are dark, from the countryside. A lot of people are also coming from other cities and compare it that way. People tell me that Brussels appears very bright to them, and then the opinion about that can differ yes, it makes me feel safe, I like it better here. Or, oh, no, I felt just fine the way things were back home. I never had a problem. So I think that's interesting to hear a whole range of opinions on the same thing, depending on where you come from and what's your experience.
Speaker 1:Let's turn to some ecological news, as scientists now notice Alan's impact on ocean life. It's been found that Alan artificial light at night could be contributing to the impairment of seagrass growth. In a study listed in Nature, researchers found that light at night caused seagrass to promote anti-stress genes, which inhibited growth. It's important to note that this study isn't another early look at the potential coastal impacts of Alan on sea life, and Alan appears to be playing a role in reducing the global seagrass meadows. Continuing through ecology, a separate article points to the impact of Alan on glowworm populations, namely that artificial light at night inhibits glowworm mating. Glowworms found uniquely in a handful of regions around the world fall in line with similar characteristics to that of lightning bugs.
Speaker 1:Fireflies From the Journal of Experimental Biology researchers discovered that Alan not only prevents male glowworms from reaching females, but also increases the time they take to reach females and the time they spend avoiding exposure to light. Actually, I can anecdotally vouch for this. On the firefly side, we just moved into an area that's pretty locally shielded by trees and on a recent night it just rained and we saw upwards of over 10 times the amount of fireflies as we drove back to our old place, which was in a modestly bright neighborhood which you maybe saw, like you know, maybe one, two, three fireflies in here. The field was pretty well lit with them. Do any of these studies surprise you guys?
Speaker 2:I can take that first. My colleague, leonard, does a lot of research on the way insects experience light, and it should be obvious that they experience light completely differently from the way we do. But what does that mean? Right, we've all seen insects buzzing around the lights at night. But what happens to them afterwards? If you follow up on that? A lot of them just remain so dazed and confused and exhausted from that experience of buzzing around all night that in fact they don't survive. So, yeah, to imagine things like the seagrass and, as you said earlier, the level of sensitivity that things in nature have to different levels of light, we are just beginning to catch up with that.
Speaker 3:I think something that's interesting and important to note is that artificial light at night is only one environmental stressor for these animals in a world actually full of environmental stressors. But for example, just like two weeks ago, there was an article in the local paper how anecdotally, people all across New.
Speaker 3:Jersey are realizing that they are not seeing as many lightning bugs as they used to see even a few years ago, and certainly not as many as when they were kids, and light pollution is certainly implicated in that. But so is over development, and so is climate change, and so is herbicides and pesticides sprayed on farm fields or sprayed to get rid of lantern flies, and you can go down the list. So it's important to realize that, in a world that is experiencing what scientists describe as an ecological crisis, we need to make a positive difference in the areas we can.
Speaker 3:Some things, like climate change, are hard to change or control especially locally, but we could all turn off our lights locally, and that's one of the reasons why I think light pollution is an issue that excites me, because it's the one thing where, as if everybody just got on board and turn off their lights tonight unlike other kinds of pollution, which are persistent in the environment it would be gone. There would be no light pollution.
Speaker 1:That's a really good way to put it, jared. I will say this. We have one last ecological piece here, and this is directly affected by light pollution, or at least it appears In Europe. An isopod known as the sea slayer, which is an inch long wood louse, forges along the coast of for algae. At night, it actually changes color to blend in with its surroundings.
Speaker 1:A study in the proceeds of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences found that sky glow negatively impacted the ability of sea slayers to remain camouflaged at night, since they had this adaptive mechanism. Sky glow actually causes sea slayers to become physically lighter in color at night, thereby allowing predators, usually birds, easier access to the visibility. So yeah, there you have it, just another way that actually, in this case, light pollution directly affects ecological behavior. But I agree, there's so many variables here for so many species and being able to knock off one would be a huge win. And, bill, to your point, I'd love to hear more about your colleagues' research and to definitely see how your colleagues are able to isolate light as a factor in insect behavior. That'd be great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, another thing that we're looking into is the idea that flicker can make a difference for insects, and so one of the ways that we dim LEDs is we don't power them at a lower level. We turn them on and off really fast, and then the amount of time that they're on versus the amount of time that they're off is the level of brightness that works just fine for us, but for insects, what is the effect of that? It's actually completely unknown as of right now, and if it is an issue that comes into conflict with, I'd say, the industry standard way of doing things. So again, what is the effect? It's completely unknown as of now.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting research here, so we'll have to keep an eye on that. That's great. Well, before we jump into our policy segment, which we're pretty much there, I wanted to give you guys a chance to plug yourselves. So, bill, where can people learn more about you? Philadelphia, moon men or anything else, any other projects that you're actually working on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would tell people. I imagine a lot of your listeners are from the Philadelphia area, new Jersey, pennsylvania. So it's still phillymoonmenorg. If you are near South Street one night and you want to see the moon or the craters, the moons of Jupiter, saturn's rings, brendan is still there and he will still lend a view through his telescope. So the shout out is really to him, to our viewers today. Phillymoonmenorg also on Instagram. For myself, our group here is the Brussels lunatics and will actually be in the next year moving this project to Berlin, so trying to get Street astronomy going in another capital city. We'll see how that goes.
Speaker 1:Now will the lunatics? Do you think lunatics will be able to survive after the move? Will they stay put?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are a lot of people who are interested in doing astronomy in the city center. I never thought I would be saying that, but we have a lot of friends we've made along the way who have learned how to use this equipment and I'm really excited to keep working with people on that.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Maybe you'll be a model for other city upstarts. That's great news, Jared. Where can people learn more about all of your work, your videos? Where can they find you?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I have a video production company named 100 year films. So if you hop on the internet and all one word type in 100 year films, you can kind of learn more about me. See some of that stuff. One of the last big films I made was here in Jersey in Sausage. We have a big forest called the Pine Barrens. It's probably the darkest sky so you could find in New Jersey.
Speaker 3:But what people really love to go down to the Pine Barrens for is, if you own a big mud truck or a Jeep or an ATV or a dirt bike, is go around and throw some mud, which I know sounds like a lot of fun to a lot of people and it probably is, but it's also habitat for threatened endangered species down there, and these habitats get totally destroyed by people coming not just from New Jersey anymore but from as far as like Virginia and New York and Philly and all over the place, because there's fewer and fewer wild areas where you can basically lawlessly do what you want.
Speaker 3:But the Pine Barrens has traditionally been one of them. So the film is called Pine Mud and it's about a young conservationist down there who's trying to make a positive difference on this issue, and that was on PBS around here in the Northeast. So that was one I worked on recently. I mentioned earlier in the show I do a lot of work for the Princeton University Office of Sustainability. That's kind of like my side gig, and they have a YouTube channel as well. So if you type all that in there you'll see some videos I've worked on in the past and one I'm working on right now that interests me and kind of share.
Speaker 3:Some similarity to the light pollution story is the fact that upward to one billion birds in the United States every year fly into buildings and die big glass buildings, and part of the problem is bad design. There's some really simple things we could do to bring that number down. So the film is about what some researchers and students at Princeton University are trying to do to educate the public about this and also create some real changes on campus as well. So stay tuned for that one.
Speaker 1:Excellent, I'm looking forward to it. That's big news around here is trying to reduce bird deaths and and certainly light pollution factors into the bird death problem, because during migration as I understand it.
Speaker 3:you know, birds, which generally navigate by the stars, will sometimes be attracted by these bright city lights, go off course and either crash into a building or just fly around brightly lit buildings for a while and exhaust themselves and not make the journey. So places I believe Philadelphia is one of them. You'll hear about things like lights out campaigns during fall migration or spring migration, and that's to give migrating birds, many of which are threatened or endangered, the best chance to make their migration without flying into something and dying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right, and you'll see the lights go out after midnight, usually during migration season, for the brightest commercial buildings downtown. I think that was really driven by Comcast. They built this light stick and then they had a record number of birds fly into it one night. So it was a cloudy night and the birds got very disoriented, and that's usually when you have these mass kills and with Comcast said, all right, we don't want to be known as the place that kills all the birds. We just started switching their lights out. After midnight you saw a number of other big name businesses follow suit.
Speaker 1:It is an issue here, especially the glass buildings, right? So I look forward to hearing more. And Jared Bill, this is. This is excellent. Like I'm really having a great time.
Speaker 1:So glad you guys came on here as a reminder. You at home, if you're looking for anything in this show, definitely jump on over to light pollution newscom. Stay up to date, or give a shout out, or tell Caitlin a great show over on Instagram. She always loves it when you say hi. Be sure to check us out on Reddit at our slash light pollution news, or LinkedIn at light pollution news. And finally, before we get into the policy section. I just want to give a big shout out to you guys. You know, bill and Jared, this is great. I am having really great time and I hope you guys are as well. Man, this is. This has been such a great episode and a lot of great information you guys have showed out here.
Speaker 1:So how about we start into the policy section of this show? We start with an article from Science of Special Issue regulating light pollution more than just the night sky. In this article, martin Morgan Taylor samples some of the current legal applications dealing with light pollution from the EU, south Korea, france and the UK. Light pollution regulations primarily come to us in one of two forms hard laws or bolt-on legislation. Hard laws, such as ones enacted in South Korea, utilize a brightness framework provided by the International Commission on Illumination using CIE 150, which recommends environmental lighting standards. South Korea law doesn't ban fixtures. Rather, it utilizes metric classifications of environmental zones, with E1 being the darkest and E4 being the brightest. France, too, has a hard law approach. This national law augments existing environmental legislation to, among other things, place limits on the temperature, type, angle and timing of the light, with a ladder mainly aimed at the nuisance lighting resulting from places like billboards Continuing along. The UK utilizes a bolt-on approach, appending current statutes on the books to provide a guidance on land development and I believe, jared or Bill, one of you guys mentioned the air pollution bolt-on piece that we spoke about before.
Speaker 1:And thanks to our fractured federal and state jurisdictions, here in the US we have a mixture of both hard and bolt-on regulatory laws, depending on your municipality and your state. Such laws come front and center, as in the recent Walsh-Och County Iber Valley Temple Dispute, which we covered last month and is still going strong. We have a number of articles discussing communities here in the US that have actually embraced a natural nighttime environment, including this one from San Francisco Gate. Oddly enough, connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed into law a lights out program to protect migrating birds, as we just spoke about. And how about this? From Groveland, florida. Groveland is now the first certified dark sky community in the Sunshine State. To do this, groveland will have to adopt a comprehensive regulation on exterior building and nighttime street lighting. These retrofits on all city-owned lights must be completed over the course of five years out to 2027, per the new ordinance. Here's one of our warm-up friends, bonnie Pang's heart Earlier this month, pennington, new Jersey, right outside of Princeton Jared. Is that your neck of the woods? Yeah, it's pretty close.
Speaker 3:I go through Pennington quite often.
Speaker 1:Okay, We've been implemented ordinance 2023-5 with the apparent goal of reducing again nuisance lighting, but for those steps forward, we continue to see fear-based framing of the night sky lighting issues, mainly as what appears to be a justification for spending large sums of public dollars. This is one from India News where the Delhi government plans to install 90,000 smart street lights with the explicit goal to eliminate any shaded regions. Under the framing of protecting women In the community article, the Delhi government is doing whatever it can to strengthen women's security. Smart street lights will play a pivotal role in eliminating dark spots and instilling a sense of safety among citizens, particularly women. This policy will see the replacement of upwards of 60,000 lights with LED smart street lights. And then we have one from Columbus, Ohio, where the city approved a $2 million street lighting and municipal upgrade. This is per NBC4.
Speaker 1:We know that when a neighborhood is well lit it's safer for pedestrians, for motorists, for folks to prevent crime. That comes to us from Columbus City Councilmember Rob Dorrance. We have this piece from WBRC in Nashville, through which the resident of an apparently safe community by day doesn't at all feel safe at night because a street light is out. Threaded into the story is a horrible tale of a mother who lost her son due to a traffic fatality that occurred when a driver hit him as he walked down the street, apparently due to a missing street light. Interestingly, we have one piece from TMJ4 in Milwaukee, where street lights are being knocked down at an ever-increasing rate, costing Milwaukee $2.8 million just in 2022, forcing the city to actually add a line item to cover the annual cost of street lights being knocked down. So there's something to consider.
Speaker 1:The science article looked at the regulatory framework for these three countries, but, considering the above and even California Governor Gavin Newsom's winter veto of the legislation that would have provided responsible lighting measures to public buildings owned by the state of California, how viable actually is the regulatory solution? Is there a better path? What do you guys think?
Speaker 3:I certainly think that good, smart government regulation can be a faster way to fix a problem than just counting on citizens out of the goodness of their hearts to make the right decision. I guess the trick is probably designing good, smart, wise regulation. So close to home in New Jersey there's a bill I've been watching. There's a state senator, andrew Zwicker, who does represent the Princeton area, and he's co-sponsor of a bill where essentially every time the state of New Jersey put up a new light itself, say along a highway, or paid for a light, as I understand it, this lighting would need to meet certain dark, sky-friendly requirements, and that's kind of one I've been watching closely because I think there's a lot of municipalities in New Jersey which don't really quite know what to do with lighting, maybe they understand that light pollution is a problem but there's not really a model to follow for a solution.
Speaker 3:I think sometimes if a bigger entity like the state kind of sets a model or sets a standard, then a town or a township in New Jersey might have a better idea of what their ordinances can look like.
Speaker 3:And then one other thing I would add about kind of the local level is I live in a place that actually has a pretty decent dark sky ordinance. You know, like don't light up your neighbor's yard and don't point them up, things like that. But what I've found and what I've heard from other people is that it's one thing to have that law on the books, even locally, but it's a completely other thing to have that enforced. You know, when I drive down the street basically people are lighting absolutely in any way they want to and nobody's saying anything about it. You know, I think there's nobody going door to door saying you know your lighting doesn't meet code. I think maybe if you're a neighbor and your neighbor puts up lights and they're blasting you, you might have some recourse because you could go to the books, but probably ordinances. Look, ordinances alone, from what I could see, might not make a huge difference, because there's no lighting police. You know, in town making people shade their lights, the right way.
Speaker 1:No, any thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no lighting police, and I think really the solution to that is people are going to light things the way they want. So if you can influence what people want and what they think is going to suit them for the situation, then that's how you, that's how you get people to police themselves. I guess if you make everyone a lighting designer, if you can get more people to understand a few simple principles that benefit them, then they will make better choices with their lighting.
Speaker 1:These lighting upgrades have to be justified, and I don't really know, you know, what the fiscal situation of all of these communities are, but always feels like they have to justify, and they have to justify it with fear. They can't just say, hey, we're going to make an improvement here, it's going to, it's going to enable us to, you know, to X, y and Z will be able to cut costs. But they always have to justify with fear and all these articles. Each month we see very similar articles on how street lights have saved the world and there's no crime anywhere that has street lights and how it just, you know, prevents criminals from doing anything. They're just setting the stage for them to do a lighting retrofit, which is just very, very interesting to see that stuff come along.
Speaker 1:But to your point, jared, you have communities that don't. They put stuff on the books, but it's kind of like a, you know, when you're driving down the street. I mean, here in Philly we have laws for traffic, you know, we have traffic codes, but I would say they're they don't even I don't know if they've been enforced ever. You know, it's the same thing, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I wouldn't understate the value of setting a good example, whether you're an individual or a community. What I mean by that is maybe like three days ago, I got an email from dark sky and lighting advocate in Washington DC who saw Dark Sacred Night the film, and she said they're trying to make positive progress on lighting in DC, which I've read is the most probably light polluted place in the country, and what she was looking for was examples of college campuses and other institutions that do lighting really well, because there's a lot of college campuses and institutions in DC and sometimes if you could do it on a you know the microcosm of a college campus, you could take that and expand it. So I shared with her some ideas of universities and colleges which are doing some interesting things, or doing some things better than others.
Speaker 3:But to point people to the good examples those good examples need to exist, so some organization or some institution has to be the first one to go out and do the right thing, and sometimes it's expensive. And sometimes it's also scary because you don't want to be the first institution to not light your campus as much and you know God forbid someone gets hurt. They blame the lighting.
Speaker 3:But to make a positive difference some organization or college campus has to be the first one to do it right, and kudos to those organizations and college campuses around the country which are starting to take the first steps?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we just had. Last month we had a article from talking about Western Washington University that actually retrofitted everything to be dark sky compliant and they still have plenty, plenty of light. Light was exactly where it needed to be right, only at the walking paths and industry and the parking lots. We didn't have any stray light. It was a pretty cool piece to come across. Once you have the example, you can start growing it, and it doesn't need to be. You don't need a dark place, right? Right, bill, we're not talking about turning off the lights. We're talking about being intelligent about your placement and your use of the light.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we want to ask for well-designed spaces. I mean, it's just like the example of the Comcast Tower. Who would have thought that that installation would be the example to set for other places to follow and to make a material improvement on the lighting in Thilly, or at least in that case it may mean turning them off, but overall we're trying to find a better balance with nature and the science is coming through on that and we're going to figure out how to do that, but we need to want it to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said Bill. Well, let's finish up the policy section here. I'd be remiss to not highlight tensions on the Southern Arizona border In the 2019-2021,. The US government installed 2,000 stadium lights along the Trump border wall. Customs and border protection plan to switch on those lights and also plan to install even more lights, because you know you need more stadium lights. It's not bright enough. This was until a Center for Biological Diversity report indicated how 16 endangered and threatened species would be severely affected. This impact is even more pertinent considering many of the lands where stadium lights were fast-tracked and installed were placed in sensitive environmental areas, such as national wildlife refuges and national monuments. In response, the CBP initially said that was nice and will conduct our environmental assessment prior to installing the next round of lights. However, now it appears that the CBP will actually undertake a full assessment of its impact in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act, giving hope to some that the lights may remain off, customs and Border Patrol did issue this telling statement.
Speaker 1:Lighting cameras and detection technology provide border agents with the domain awareness which is critical to remote and urban areas. Main awareness provides agents with the ability to track and respond to illicit cross-border activity more effectively and minimizes the response time for urgent and emergency situations involving migrants. Additionally, the lighting cameras and detection technology which are part of the barrier system will provide awareness when breaching activity is detected, which is anticipated to reduce the long-term maintenance and repair costs. So what are your thoughts about? Did you guys have a chance to look at this one? Do you guys have any thoughts on? Is this a temporary road bump for the Customs and Border Patrol before they light up the whole border, or do these environmental groups seem to be able to have something here? I'm curious about your thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was really curious about this one too and I'm still wondering. They have night vision goggles, right. So I mean, maybe that's naive of me, but I'm just thinking, if the troops have night vision, then what is the need for all of this lighting? But it still is interesting to see an environmental concern up against a security concern and both of these things being given equal consideration under an illegal way. So I guess we'll see. Right, the debate will be had in the public eye, so that's important.
Speaker 1:Why not use motion detectors?
Speaker 2:That's another question, right? I'm not the kind of lighting designer that you would ask to design a high security installation, but I would still ask them, right, does do motion detectors play a role? What's the role there in security and balancing the needs of security with the needs of nature? I'm sure they would have a better opinion than I would on that.
Speaker 3:Jared any thoughts? Certainly not my area of expertise but it's interesting that light pollution even plays into national security and border security questions. Complicated stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's a very complicated issue, right. So we'll keep an eye on that and who knows how it's going to go forward in the future. But before we go, we have two very, very quick, heartwarming stories, and before that, I want to thank you at home for staying with us as a reminder. Light pollution news comes out once a month. Do subscribe to light pollution news wherever you find and listen to podcasts, and please share and spread the word If you find the show insightful or valuable. We really do appreciate you, the listener, and hope that you can continue to connect with us as we move forward. So, lastly, for today, these are two quick stories to definitely stir this all Next up. You're never going to know what you're going to wake up to in Malibu and this one might take the cake A black bear took an evening stroll recently, crossing three highways to enjoy the nighttime waves.
Speaker 1:This became apparent when residents noticed rather large footsteps in the AM sand, my camp spot actually in Alaska. A couple of weeks back, we found a number of big old paw prints. Definitely makes you a little nervous, for sure, when you wake up. And hey, we have this next one here. It's okay to indulge your inner 12 year old. So here we go. I'm giving you full permission. Raise your hand. If you're ever a fan of the WWE, well oh hell yes. Steve Austin became a stargazing attendant for A&E's network. Stone Cold Takes On America. The retired WWE Superstar Stone Cold, steve Austin, was treated to shots of Saturn, andromeda, nebula, jupiter and the Ring Nebula. I want to thank these two great hardworking gentlemen. Got Bill Green over here all the way from Brussels. Bill, what time is it over there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. We're almost at midnight, so I'm definitely going to be winding down after this, but I love being here and, yeah, thank you for having me on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you for coming on the show and I'm glad it's not midnight yet. We're going to try and get you out of here before midnight. And Jared Flesher some great videos and some great, some great resources over there. Jared, thank you so much for coming on the show, really appreciate it and this has been a lot of fun. I hope you guys have had a great time. You know, if you guys ever want to come back, love to have you guys back on. As a reminder, you at home find all the links and details regarding this show and more over LightPollutionNewscom. And thank you for listening and may just enough light shine only exactly where it's needed. And it's another LPN in the books. Thank you.