Text 'Yes' or 'No' in Response to June 2024 Poll!
This month, host Bill McGeeney is joined by Ben Chappell, of the Narrowband Channel, Matthias Schmitt, Cedar Breaks National Monument Night Sky Program Manager, and environmental educator / blogger, Frank Turina.
See Full Show Notes at LightPollutionNews.com.
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.
Text 'Yes' or 'No' in Response to June 2024 Poll!
This month, host Bill McGeeney is joined by Ben Chappell, of the Narrowband Channel, Matthias Schmitt, Cedar Breaks National Monument Night Sky Program Manager, and environmental educator / blogger, Frank Turina.
See Full Show Notes at LightPollutionNews.com.
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.
LifeLation News, november 2023, ask Folk Dreams. Whoa, what a panel we have today, including Matthias Schmidt of National Park Services, cedar Breaks National Monument. Manchappell of the narrowband YouTube channel and environmental educator, mr Frank Torina. Guess what the sphere is alive? Would a sphere be the shape of things to come? How do animals like sea turtles and deer see the world? Chicago's House of Horror continues this gruesome march through history. And how would you feel about a lit ring atop your car? It's time for another LifeLation News. Friends, all this and way more coming right on. Hey, welcome to another LifeLation News. I'm your host, bill McGeaney, and I'm very thrilled to have this panel with me today. We have a great one for you, friends, you guys. I'm very excited. This is we've got three great, great AshO educators here. First up, you may know from the narrowband YouTube channel, mr Ben Chappell. Welcome to the show, ben. Now for this. You at home wondering what the heck is a narrowband? Well, this is a particular method of astrophotography, isn't it right, ben? Watch your health. Yes, it's faith, and lighten us.
Speaker 2:So with narrowband imaging it's essentially a light pollution proof process of astrophotography by which we use very tight filters and we can reject usually about 99% of light pollution. Now that means you have much longer exposure times. You're getting more into the science of astrophotography because then you start to image the actual chemicals that are in space.
Speaker 1:Right. What would you mean by that? What does that mean? Actual chemicals?
Speaker 2:So when things burn, they burn at a very specific light frequency which can be isolated. Okay, for example, when you burn something a Benson burner, like it it goes off of a very specific color and that color you can reject all other light and just accept that color through, and by that, essentially, you're blocking almost all other types of light and thus light pollution, because light pollution is across the entire spectrum of the rainbow, whereas these chemical reactions are extremely narrow slivers of the rainbow.
Speaker 1:How'd you get into narrowband? What took you?
Speaker 2:there Frustration with basically light pollution.
Speaker 1:Ben, you were doing that. When you started narrowband channel, you were in Harrisburg, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, I was in the city at the time and now I'm out in the country and, ironically, I still do mostly narrowband imaging, and that's because, well, I've gotten really good at it over the years and even out in I'm way out in the country. Now there's still just stuffy you can image with narrowband that you can't image any other way, for example, even the Hubble telescope. It's in a portal zero zone, it's out in space, and yet NASA still uses narrowband filters to basically block a lot of light pollution from stars, so to speak, because your stars get really big and bloated in broadband images because they're broadband, whereas the chemical reactions that are in space from these nebulas and dust clouds are very narrow spectrum and so you can shoot through the stars, so to speak.
Speaker 1:You've got to get rid of all the other crap, right, you've got to just break it down to them. Let me make some phenomenal photographs. So yeah, Well, the other big news, I guess, is you've had an ongoing battle with cancer. We're so sorry to hear this. I recall when we talked over at Cherry Springs back in June, you mentioned that you had some kind of digestive issue or something was going on. So what happened? What's going on?
Speaker 2:Well, I've lost about close to 50 pounds total, I think a little bit after we had talked to Cherry Springs and actually I found out that I had cancer just a couple days after you and I talked really Basically. I got home and I hadn't been able to eat in such a long time that something was up and basically its cancer is what it is.
Speaker 1:You're in demand. Is that right? I guess I don't know how reoccurring this actual cancer is.
Speaker 2:Surprisingly, I've had three other college buddies contact me and say, hey, I've got the exact same cancer as you do.
Speaker 1:Oh, jesus what college you go to.
Speaker 2:I've got to make sure. Each of them is a little bit different. What?
Speaker 1:were they feeding you guys?
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's got colon cancer and he had kidney cancer. Mine was just in the stomach. He was on the inside wall. I was having issues with eating. I was basically starving to death because I couldn't eat. I had dropped almost 50 pounds. I got down to about 140 pounds and it was just skin and bones. Now my weight's back up. I'm back up 25 pounds now as it was recording this, which is great news because I'm on the mend.
Speaker 1:Excellent, moving in the right direction, thank God. That must have been really terrifying, because you have three small kids, right, I have four, four small kids. Okay, well, it's a little.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at three, when we talked to Cherry Springs and my wife gave birth. Of course I'm about the same time we found out I had cancer. Oh my.
Speaker 1:God Wow, what a roller coaster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Tima is bare. I tell you what Wow.
Speaker 1:Let's shift subjects over to Latias. You're in Utah, is that right? Or is that where I'm guessing you're at? No, I'm in Southwest Utah. Yes, you're correct, southwest Utah. Okay, so you're a Darskye coordinator for National Park Service in Cedar Breaks, is that right?
Speaker 4:Yeah, Cedar Breaks National Monument.
Speaker 1:Nice, yeah, and I know you're an eclipse chaser, matthews, why don't you so? I guess you probably didn't have too far to go. How was this past eclipse? This probably was.
Speaker 4:It was really good. We had several programs going on in Cedar Breaks and I worked with my colleagues in Zion at the visitor center. We were just outside the path of annularity so we got an 89.2% partial eclipse. If you would have driven 15 miles north you would have gotten an 89.3% annular eclipse With the moons. This is centered perfectly in the disc of the sun. But these events, these eclipses, are great outreach events because you look at the sun and it is amazing how the moons disc moves across the sun in three hours and how you can connect the everyday with the extraordinary and prepare the people for the total solar eclipse next year that we have on April 8th in the United States. You really see the solar system at work during the day in an amazing way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how was the reception just for the event that you guys held?
Speaker 4:It was a smashing success, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Who doesn't love any kind of an eclipse, right it's surreal, yeah, you know. Right.
Speaker 4:It is surreal and I think back and I try to explain to people. Imagine our ancestors 2000 years ago, a thousand years ago, that saw something like this happen, where the sun is the source of life and energy for us and didn't know what was going on. At some point, we realized how this works. The primal fear in homo sapiens probably led to expanding our knowledge about how things truly work and figure things out, which is what we're really good at.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see that. I can really see it spurring thought, right? Every time I see an eclipse or if it's any eclipse you're talking about lunar, solar, any part of an eclipse it spurs thought, right? The first thought comes to my mind is what's going on there, right? What am I actually seeing, and visually? Obviously, your brain can make up a lot of answers to that, but there's just so many different things going on, including basic math, right? Your brain is timing this thing as it goes on and you're checking in on it. You have a time component. It's really, really an interesting multifaceted experience, and you've been everywhere to see these eclipse. You've been down to Antarctica. Tell me about that. How was that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so the eclipse, by the way, is an attack on the census. You hear wildlife and you don't hear it. You see the temperature change dramatically after 80% going forward. The light takes on a ghostly veil, a ghostly shimmer that I do not experience anywhere but doing an eclipse, and you see the shadow bands. You see the partial eclipses through the leaves of the trees. It is exciting and mesmerizing.
Speaker 4:So my first total solar eclipse was August 21, 2017. And a lot of the listeners probably remember where they were and what they saw. And this was my first total solar eclipse. And after I experienced this, something happened to me and as a scientist, it's really hard to pinpoint what exactly happened, but I got invigorated, I got rejuvenated. I was a science major in engineering school, at physics, and I signed up for my master's in astronomy, became active in the astronomy club in New York City, started teaching astronomy at a local high school. So astronomy became my life.
Speaker 4:And 2019, I was in Argentina for the total solar eclipse. 2020 couldn't travel to Argentina because of COVID. And 2021 I decided to go to Antarctica because that's just around the corner from Utah here. Yeah, why not? And I figured this is a once in a lifetime. I will either go to Antarctica to see the eclipse or we'll probably never go down there.
Speaker 4:So I realized, based on the weather forecast for December and the South Scotia Sea, that the cloud cover was usually very high, that there was a better chance on mainland Antarctica, where there actually was a eclipse camp where you could go there for a week and camp there and take a plane from Ushuaia, but that cost to the tune of $50,000 and I didn't want to mortgage my house. So the sailing down there on an expedition vessel was expensive enough, but I thought, okay, I missed 2020. So I'm going for it and, lo and behold, and I met some fantastic NASA scientists down there that regularly observe total solar eclipses, because that's a low cost method to observe the solar corona and, with narrow bends, to gain more insight about the astrophysical causes of why the corona is millions of degrees when the photosphere is only a few thousand degrees. Unfortunately, on the morning of the eclipse it was cloudy, so the clouds went dark and they went bright again and that was the extent of the eclipse.
Speaker 4:But when you're in Antarctica, you see so many amazing pieces of wildlife and nature and following on the trails of the endeavor and shackle was just so inspiring how he rescued all his men in a three year journey, getting stuck in the pack eyes. They come back to Europe and wrote one was happening and half of this man got killed in battle. Antarctica is definitely a once in a lifetime place to visit. That nature is untouched and pristine and I that. My. Some of my first responses and observations were I can never order anything on Amazon ever again, because of the impact that my daily behavior has on our planet and how this fragile ecosystem down there suffers from from human behavior. But then I came back and ordered a book about shackle on Amazon, so forgive me.
Speaker 1:Well, they passed this once.
Speaker 4:And then I was in Australia this year in April where I visited dark sky parks. Oh yeah, excellent. Yeah, they learn more about how they work, and the southern hemisphere is just stunning the southern Milky Way and the constellations. So I live a very adventurous life. I don't have kids or or wife, so I spent all my free money on chasing eclipses and astronomy equipment.
Speaker 1:Wow, Well, we all wish to stuff your shoes now. I love this story about the eclipse. Frank, it's been a while, it's been a couple months. You have any good? I want to hear some good eclipse stories. You got anything good?
Speaker 5:No, I think what happened to you at that, when you saw your first eclipse, is the sense of awe. You know, you get this sense of all. The same thing happened to me. You saw the total eclipse back in 2017. And the feeling I got when it was completely dark was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. Like you know, you get tingles and, you know, do you have the smile on your face? You can't help it. Everybody, you know, in this big parking lot where we were set up, you know, was just happy and smiling.
Speaker 5:And I started looking into the literature on awe and awe generates a whole bunch of sort of psycho, positive, psychosocial reactions of people. So people who experience awe a lot of the time, you know, frequently or occasionally, they are more altruistic, they're more empathetic, they're more compassionate, they see themselves as part of a bigger, you know, community. So there's this positive, you know, reaction to experiencing awe, and I did the same thing. I started right after the eclipse, I went and bought my first telescope, I started doing astrophotography and so, you know, in the five or six years since, that's pretty much been my main hobby, pretty much my life. So, yeah, I think that's kind of what you feel and that's that definitely is what I felt.
Speaker 1:Frank, I know last time you were on we did have a chance to speak about this, but I know you run. You have the Night Sky Resource Center. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about what that is?
Speaker 5:So the Night Sky Resource Center is my blog in my website. It basically allows me to do a few things. One it lets me sort of ruminate and write on light pollution and night sky topics. You know I threw that platform. I also share some research and news that I find interesting about light pollution and night sky.
Speaker 5:And I hope I also provide some inspiration for people to protect the night sky and to appreciate the night sky. And I do that through connecting to my astrophotography and hopefully that kind of inspires people to have that seek out that type of experience.
Speaker 1:Really it's just a vehicle. It's wonderfully written, oh thank you. It's a great blog you have over there.
Speaker 5:Thanks. Yeah, it's a lot of fun and it's just really a vehicle that allows me to kind of continue to contribute to the Night Sky Movement.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, I hope all of you guys had a chance to look at the moon last night. Evidently it was International Observe the Moon, right, matias? Did you guys have anything for that? I know there's 3,000. They said there are 3,000 events going on around North America.
Speaker 4:Yeah, last night we didn't have a public event. The Cedar Brakes is closed now for the season because we're over 10,000 feet and we closed the Ranger Station last week. But we want to provide a stargazing in the winter. We'll have a new building that we can use. We care about our visitor's health and we'll have a little fire slash heating elements so that we can go outside and look at the stars they're amazing in the winter and then warm up and then kind of go back and forth. So that's one of the plans that we do.
Speaker 4:A little bit differently, starting in January this year, my boss also had the insightful idea to start and offer solar observing. We have a Coronado that we use and half of our astronomy programs. Visitors experienced the sun through an H-Alpha telescope in a way that they usually do not see it and again, that gives us an opportunity to teach people and share with them how the sun works, because the sun is the closest star and at night we see plenty of stars, so there's always opportunities to connect what we see in the sky with the daily life. We had one weekend where I talked about I like to give people homework, that's always optional, but we talked about Oppenheimer, the moon Z and nuclear fusion and nuclear fission and how they relate to stars. So we want to. We always talk about science, whether people like it or not, but the skies are excellent, that CEDA breaks and we love doing programs for the public.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll definitely have to get out there. I look forward to that, all right? Well, let's get into it. It's all that's happened this month, and I mean a lot. The sphere is alive and, frank, I know last time you were on we had different talked about sphere. I feel like the sphere is kind of like our little Elon Musk you know Pulsar guy sitting around. So are any of you guys, you too, fans? We have any of you two fans in the audience here that we have on the panel. I don't see any arms raised and so I'm I'm guessing okay, we got, I have that.
Speaker 4:I live close to Vegas. I go there plenty of times. My niece from Germany was just visiting and then we took a look at the, you know, at the sphere from the outside is, I have to say, from a science perspective, it's an amazing technological marvel.
Speaker 1:It's incredible.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I want to go on a show inside. I have seen clips on how it looks. It's fantastic. There were these funny clips where the sphere is turned into a little emoji and they look down on golfers that are on the on the golf course, you know, teeing off, and it kind of raises its eyebrows.
Speaker 1:So the sphere, right, cause YouTube just opened up there. On the inside it's very, very much immersive, right, but on the outside you have 1.2 million hockey puck LEDs that are placed to to create these experiential exterior shows. For the most part, you know, I'll say it's a visual lot of loser, right? So I, I had a buddy who, actually, who went to to see you too, one of the opening nights and the, the videos and the pictures he shared were pretty incredible. But then, from a dark sky perspective, right, this thing is, this thing is like its own star, right. So it's super realistic videos that, wrapped around a giant ball and the super bright sphere, is itself a tourist attraction. Let's see, I don't know if you've driven down there, right, they're causing traffic jams. People actually step out to pull off to the side and they want to photograph with it and get some videos and, and you know, kind of share what they're seeing out there. I'm sure when F1 comes, it's going to, you know, again, be be the centerpiece of their, their nice pastless racing schedule.
Speaker 1:So the idea of the sphere for you at home came from James Dolan of Madison Square Garden, a Sam organization, that there was a Knicks and the Rangers, and the whole idea behind it is to create a ball. That's it changes the concert experience. However, he also wants to create one in London and, per CBS News, this group named to stop MSG Sphere, which is what the Londoners call it, and they're kind of terrified because of what they saw on Vegas. So residents believe that MSG Sphere will severely bright the area and they surmise that the actual venue experience isn't really going to be about the venue as much as it's going to be becoming nonstop gigantic LED board for commercials. So the MSG organization, trying to overcome some of this community pushback, they're really pulling out some of the stops.
Speaker 1:Msg sites upwards of 3,200 jobs to train youths on entertainment industry skills such as rigging and sound systems. They have plans to to pour money into infrastructure improvements around the area that they're trying to build in, which is Stratford and, most importantly you guys appreciate this they even offer residents blackout curtains, which is really kind of fun. So the proposed sphere is higher than the Statue of Liberty and will house 20,000 people. Is this where we're headed with with all venues? Are they all? Are you all going to have our spheres in our cities? This is giant glowing balls popping up everywhere. You've got a sphere in the high sky.
Speaker 4:it's called celestial sphere, and I'm not against growth. I'm for growth as long as it is mindful and where we use our resources in a in a way that it's sustainable. People want to be entertained. We can come to the any of our dark sky programs or Frank's to see the celestial sphere. I find it ironic that they want to offer blackout curtains to residents.
Speaker 1:That's what they do, right, Mattias?
Speaker 4:That's the least they could do, but it doesn't have to be on at night, right? So you can turn it off at night, you can turn it into the celestial sphere and people go like, oh wow, where can I see this in nature?
Speaker 5:So yeah, you know I'm encouraged by the pushback that we're seeing for a lot of these things. Right, I think the last time I was on we talked about the LED billboards in Miami and you know the pushback that they were getting on. That you know, basically from citizen groups. They were saying like no way, we don't want this. You know the same thing happening in life and then hopefully we'll have an impact. So I'm encouraged by that. I think it'll kind of put the brakes on and moderate the tendency to create a sphere in every city. But I think I'm encouraged by some of the pushback that we've seen from a public standpoint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to your point, frank, in Miami we actually have some good news on that where they actually Miami is not going to put up those billboards, they want to put up billboards all throughout the downtown, which we're not talking about a dark area, but at the same time they want to put up largely trunk billboards in parks, in green space that they already have. So the community, successfully, was able to push that back, so Kudos to Miami.
Speaker 2:There is actually policies being developed in Las Vegas that regulate the brightness of some of these LED screens and I know this because I work for a trade show company. We're out there all the time and I feel employees have already been to the sphere and they say it's incredible, but it's an experience unlike any other kind of like. But it he didn't really talk about that much, as if it was like mind blowing, like I would see something in nature.
Speaker 4:Right, I think someone from the Las Vegas community. I think it might have been the city I'm on, the Colorado Plateau Dark Sky Cooperative. We put on quarterly programs to educate the residents and government, state, local agencies about the benefits of the dark skies of the Colorado Plateau. And that person from Las Vegas took what we presented in terms of the effects on people's health, their circadian rhythm, by these excessive lights in big cities, including the sphere. It is something, there's something in preserving dark skies and protecting them for everyone that people can learn about and use as leverage to share with others. This is what we're doing and this is the not just the potential impact. This is impact that we can prove scientifically how this affects the circadian rhythm of people's, their mental health and life and wildlife, and et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:When we moved to the country we my wife and I slept so much better because we had two darkness at night. Yeah, man, in the city we had room darkening blinds and despite two layers of those room darkening blinds, I still get up at night and walk through the house tripping over anything because so much light was coming through the windows, despite my blinds.
Speaker 1:Ben isn't. I always look at it because I live here in Philadelphia, but we, at the car moment, have a situation where it's we actually have a natural night, and nighttime is such a miserable experience for most people. Right, ben, to your point. It's just such a miserable experience, you don't. You don't get good sleep. You always have someone doing something that's affecting you, Like your neighbor is always doing something that's affecting you. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:The New York city, the city that never sleeps. This is not healthy.
Speaker 4:No, no, I lived in New York city for 15 years. I have direct evidence on what it can do to people's health and minds.
Speaker 1:Well, matias, on that note, let's offset the tall good of the sphere here with Frank, to your point, some, some small grassroots efforts we're seeing, because we are seeing stuff come up from the bottom. And in Chicago land we have the forest district of DuPage County, which is actually budgeting for some major dark sky upgrades in the parts of the district that are actually lit. Breckenridge is attempting to become a certified dark sky community, a feat that's estimated to cost the town around $3.6 million and presumed retrofits in other compliance related activities. Breckenridge started down this journey back in 2007 and originally set the deadline for compliance by 2022, but has since moved the finish line out to 2025. There's a study this month in the German Journal of Urban Affairs that offers up some practical guidance for communities to actually mitigate light pollution.
Speaker 1:Building upon the example of Flagstaff, there's small movement around. There's small movement in Los Angeles County to enforce light pollution mitigation for the unincorporated rural communities. Los Angeles County surprisingly has a light pollution ordinance on the books that dates back to 2012. There's a new push to focus on rural communities within that county to create a zone of responsible lighting. I suppose the county is using that to test, to see community responses before maybe trying to see if they can dip their toes, see if other larger municipalities might want to accept something like that.
Speaker 1:Those little victories, though, were also offset by the new billboard scheme that looks like it's coming through in LA Now. It hasn't been finalized and it still has some ways to go, but out there they want to install 86 digital billboards or 49 structures around metro areas or metro owned property, which is a transportation setup that they have in the city of Los Angeles, but the billboards are going to supersede local ordinances that may prohibit that kind of advertising and that response. I know, frank, we spoke about this in a prior episode. It looks like there's some people who actually support this and other people who actually are pretty dead set against it. You see community going against it, but then on the other side, the benefactors city government, iron workers, electrical worker unions they're looking at it as, hey, this is great jobs for everyone. This is going to be a real big boon. So these little facilities and devices that we create for light pollution, they have multiple stakeholders on both sides, right.
Speaker 5:Yeah, absolutely. It's not an easy task to push back against these things. For sure You're going up against a lot of political interest and a lot of political influence and a lot of money going to campaigns to promote these types of things. It's certainly not a sure thing that grassroots participation can stop these types of things. But I do see that that is, that type of pushback is increasing, that people are going no wait, this is going to cause light pollution, which honestly, I think 20 years ago that would never happen. It wouldn't have been an issue. And I think that now that the fact that people are saying now that this is going to cause light pollution and all the negative consequences that that entails is a very encouraging point. But it is an uphill battle. For sure there's a lot of vested interests in tourism and construction and all of those types of political interest groups that are going to be pushing for these. But I'm really encouraged and hopeful that just the fact that citizens are noticing this issue and starting to push back against these projects is good.
Speaker 1:Frank, what could a small community actually do to win out? How does a small community overcome some of these entrenched stakeholders?
Speaker 5:I think that my end story was. I thought it was a good example. I mean, it was literally people signing petitions, people calling their county commissioners. They were just doing applying political pressure, and it's one thing for a politician to have to deal with. Oh, I might lose funding for my campaign if I vote this way from an industry, from an interest group, from the industry group. That's one side of the scale. The other is are my constituents going to vote for me next time? And so money goes? Obviously is very important to political campaigns, but it's not the only consideration. If you, especially a small area like a county or a municipality, if you upset the wrong group of constituents, you're likely not going to get elected, no matter how much money you have from industry groups. I think that there is a lot of power in citizen participation and I think especially in those local jurisdictions like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll see how that plays out in LA. You look at something like San Jose where the community is very much against billboards coming in and the only people who voted no against it were the two mayoral candidates everyone else voting yes on that and then you go out to Miami where there's such a revolt that they essentially had to find a different path.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and I'm sure if the politicians in Miami may have lost some funding for their campaign from certain interest groups that didn't like the way they voted, that may well be the case, but I think they also politicians are also good at reading the wins, the political wins, and knowing whether something's a political winner or a loser and voting against those financial interests if need be.
Speaker 1:I hope the best in LA. Well, I know you guys are all in Azure Photography, so I got a question have you guys witnessed Blue Walker III pass? Have you seen this guy in the sky at all? No, so when observed three times over the past year, Blue Walker III had a magnitude of .46 and.4. So for those of you at home who are not familiar with the star brightness magnitude scale, bright objects range from negative.6, which is Venus, say, the two for North Star. The negative in this case actually really means it's really bright. With a higher number of say of seven is about as dim as you could go with just your eyes. Blue Walker III crossed at a brightness of.4. Twice. That's very bright. Keep in mind, the magnitude scales logarithmic. So when I say.4 versus a magnitude of 6, we're really talking.4 was 100 times brighter than the 6th magnitude
Speaker 1:pass. The IAU, the International Astronomical Union, recommends all satellites in low Earth orbit do not exceed a brightness of 7. So the good news here is that there's a stakeholder coalition that formed in April of 2022, this EPS. They've been working with the makers of Blue Walker III, AST Space Mobile. On the face of things, it appears that AST is receptive to the concerns of astronomers, although AST players have launched upwards of 90 of these large satellites for their broadband network, nicknamed the constellation of bluebirds. You got to love the gumption of satellite companies too. You guys enjoyed this. Ast's mission statement sounds like a trait AI generator. Motto AST aims to alleviate poverty, Spurn economic development and save lives. May God bless them. I hope they can cure cancer along the
Speaker 1:way. All of this entered into the news due to a recent study that assessed the brightness of Blue Walker, the Blue Walker antenna unfolding in the relationship of bright satellites by tight above the horizon, an angle shared by the observer satellite and sun. So there's now study. People went out and studied the brightness of satellites, including the Blue Walker satellite. So in the show we recorded over summer I stumbled across an Australian news article that talked about satellite launches exceeding 500,000 before the decades out. I know you guys are chopping at the bit to discuss how this will impact the photography, but I'm curious how it's going to impact starting night advocacy. At what point? Where's the point advocating for dark skies when everything is moving above you?
Speaker 5:I think that this just demonstrates that the regulatory agencies are so far behind on this issue already. This is just going to keep getting worse and there's really nothing in place from a regulatory standpoint to control what. So really think that we need to kind of catch up and start putting regulations on the effects of satellites in orbit. Back in the day, when it was just select countries that were capable of putting satellites in orbit, it wasn't as big of an issue. But now you have thousands of companies that are all launching their own satellites and it's becoming sort of free for all up there and there's going to be impacts to the night sky and astronomy and all of that. So I think that what we really need is sort of like an international treaty system, like we have for the oceans, that really are designed to kind of nip this issue in the bud before it gets completely out of hand. But I think we're just so far behind the curve right now that we have a lot of catching up to do to try to address this issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, frank, I wonder about that right and I have to think back to my international knowledge classes to remember the sea treaties came about. I wonder if we're just not in an environment where we could get a treaty even made.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's a good point. I think there is a challenge right now politically and there's going to be a lot of pushback against it. I think keeping space open to anybody is going to be a very appealing position for a lot of people and a lot of companies, and they're going to push back against any kind of regulation. But they did that for other environmental causes too. They were pushed back against issues, regulations on hazardous materials and air pollution and putting in scrubbers and technology to reduce air pollution. I mean, there's always pushback against that type of thing and I think that there's going to be pushback against this as well. But somehow I think we need to overcome this, or it's just going to be a zoo up there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's been phenomenal, Right, you're right, there's phenomenal laws of water on air, on a lot of the tangible pollutants. Right, we even have laws on noise. Right, you have balls on noise pollution and it's questionable if they're enforced like anything else, but at the same time they're there.
Speaker 4:I think it's, if anybody, to give you an image of how things will end up if you don't do anything.
Speaker 4:Wally the film movie where you planet encircled with hundreds of thousands of satellites, and right now we have 9,000 satellites orbiting Earth have the more SpaceX I don't know what the plans are for the Blue Walker and I think it's what's the company ATS for their broadband project. It's just really bad for science and astronomy because you have science images destroyed by these Starlink trails that goes through science images. You can mitigate some of the effects of this if you have individual satellites where you can kind of predict, but the prediction of orbital dynamics and orbits of satellites is apparently challenging to do. So yeah, I agree with Frank, we have to come up with a reasonable regulation and expect from companies that they adhere to this. And it's not like the Wild West up there. We have technology to mitigate the albedo and the reflectance of the satellites and it's just another battleground for people that are passionate about the night sky to educate the public about what this does, no matter how cool it is to see a Starlink satellite that train launch in the sky.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's going to affect culturally how people look at night. Is this going to be a cultural change as well?
Speaker 5:I think it has to be partly cultural to develop that regulatory system. There has to be some sort of cultural shift, and I think we're seeing the beginning of that, where we're starting to get more people to be aware of the issue, and that's the first step. But there needs to be a better understanding that there are actual impacts and effects on humans and the environment from increasing the overall brightness of the night sky, and I think that's one of the first things that has to happen. Litigation is another kind of driver of policy change. You can get some good lawsuits at the right stakeholders.
Speaker 1:How about this? Frank Litigation is definitely a way, but what about if you have a constellation of military satellites up there and stuff becomes so unhinged that you lose your domain awareness on the ground? Right, you actually have a tactical disadvantage, because now there's just all this space junk up there, all these satellites flying around and I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, could there be national security issues with our interfering with military satellites? I don't know, but that's something that I think would be something that would put this issue on firmly on the public agenda, right, if the Pentagon came out and said that, yeah, all these satellites are kind of messing with our ability to track our enemies across the world, yeah, that's going to raise the eyebrows, right. So those are the types of things that need to happen to kind of drive this policy change to do something about the vast increase in number of satellites up there. Yeah, so I think that's kind of what needs to happen. Part of that, like you said, is a cultural change.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not a very optimistic tilt there, but I can say this that the younger generation is much more aware of this than the older generation is, like all the baby boomers, my father-in-law. He came up and he did some improvements to our kids' playground and he put lights on it and I was like I don't want lights there, I don't need them to my kids.
Speaker 1:You know Ben, do you need the lights there? Is it that dark? I mean, I know you live in a country.
Speaker 2:Okay, my parents go out at night and they say you need lights out here. And I go out at night and I'm like I can see, just fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have this. I ask because you know I was living in Philadelphia at night, especially a cloudy night. It is not dark, it is like a moonlit night. You can see in front of you. You can see, you can get a small amount of color without light in a cloudy night here in Philly, and you can. Good luck. You know, I'm sure, matias, how do you know, see the breaks? That doesn't work the same way, but here you definitely can.
Speaker 2:But hey, yeah, and I know the big thing here, like China, is like the giant in the future of these future regulations, because they're going to have a big say in things. And I will say this like my wife and I, we watched a lot of Chinese and Korean dramas and so forth, and they don't seem to be very aware of this stuff at all. Well, ben, it's all in the hands of the government.
Speaker 1:I think you have a good point. It's something that's kind of a new tradition over in Asia, but it is starting to slowly get its footing in China. Yes, yes, it definitely is. So I would think that from a national, from a research side, china probably has the same incentives that American researchers would have. And, if I recall, I think there were some Chinese observatories on that coalition that brought about that study of the satellites. But anyway, I think it's a curious question, right Is? We're wondering? We're kind of looking ahead into the future, and I know you guys are astrophotographers and this is going to ruin all of your photos going down the line when we get to have 500,000 satellites out there. But we'll see how it all plays out, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, now is a great time to take a little quick breather. What do you say? I want to thank my panel, frank Terina, ben Chappelle and Ben Chappell Ben, I'm dying with your name and Matthias, I got that one right. Matthias Schmidt, here at Light Pollution News, we're coming up on our one-year anniversary. I want to thank all of you at home who started out with us and journey this year. I really want to thank you for your generous support, helping us to be able to bring you all the news in of and around Light Pollution each month.
Speaker 1:I do have a favor to ask Do you like what we provide? Are you enjoying the show? Do you think we have value? If so, we truly appreciate if you consider being a supporter. For only the cost of a couple of calls for each month, it can help us offset some of our operating expenses. Such calls include service, space and production. The more calls we can cover, the more we'll be able to grow and offer. Thank you for considering being a supporter. You can find the link by clicking on the show notes for this very show If you're already a supporter, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:It really means a lot to me. If being a supporter isn't your thing, why not say thank you by sharing the show with folks who may be interested in the issue or folks who'd like to introduce the issue too? Did you know that you can direct people to specific chapters of the show too? So if you really want to highlight something specific you heard in the show, why not share with the timestamp? All you need to do is go to your podcast player and you can find the chapter and you can share it out, and if all of that is a bit too steep of an ask, I understand. How about taking a second to scroll down to the bottom of the podcast player you're using and provide us with a rating or review? We appreciate all of your continued support and, whatever form it takes, your feedback and continued engagement really are what drives us to move forward each month. Now jumping back into things Matias, I know you're involved in a really truly awesome project. When I saw this, I was like, wow, this is so cool. What is Space Racers?
Speaker 4:Space Racers is a CGI TV show that's about spaceships flying through the solar system. I was one of the executive producers and as COO when I was in New York. I worked for the TV show for 10 years and we are scientifically accurate, basically teaching kids space science while they're being entertained with the cool show. Every episode is 11 minutes long and the spaceships of Stardust Space Academy did not have to deal with light pollution as we humans had it.
Speaker 1:Oh, no doubt it's really. How did you get involved in that project? Did someone come to you or did you join that? How did that come about?
Speaker 4:Like the rest of my life. The universe just presents me with opportunities and I used to be in finance in New York and after another Panic Attack at work, I decided to leave finance as my body was telling me something about my life and career and through a friend of mine, I was introduced to the creator of the show and I was an engineering major in Germany. In school I always loved science. I read the cosmos by Carl Sagan in Germany when I was a kid and was always fascinated by space and science and the universe. And this working for the TV show basically put me down on this path to go back to astronomy and be out in the West the West is the best to work for the Park Service and beyond the dark skies, which are totally amazing here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm very jealous. Well, have any of you experienced noctalgia it's otherwise known as sky grief from loss of our natural night sky? I experienced it every night, but I assume, Matias and Frank, you guys probably don't experience it as much.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think sometimes when you're exposed to a really nice resource and you see it start to degrade, it almost hits you worse because you're looking at what it can be. If I look to my West, where I live, it's nice. It's probably World War III or IV or something like that. If I look to my East, towards Denver it's portal, it's mine way to the eastern horizon, and so seeing that gradation of night sky quality over in my house just sickens me. Every night I'm watching my good night sky to the West being eaten by the sky glow from Denver. So yeah, it's a struggle for me. I definitely suffer from that.
Speaker 1:Well, noctalgia comes to us from a litter that prior guest, john Barringtean, helped author. I think it may be safe to say that some of the people who may not have noctalgia is this Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Pittsburgh. Check out this story. Did you know that 84% of US military veterans suffer from moderate to severe depression, resulting in 20 suicides per day, culminating in 7,300 suicides over a span of a year? And apparently, depression tends to rise at night? So the Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic Fraternal Service Organization, raised $85,000 to put an observatory in for the Pittsburgh Veterans Affairs Hospital System, in a partnership with the Administrative Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh. Many vets now have a way to exercise their night demons without turning to alcohol or other substances. I have a little clip here. I want you guys to take a listen to this video from Knights of Columbus. Huge for the Knights. They were first shocked by the cost, but they said no, we're going to do it. This is important and they raised the money.
Speaker 2:They've raised all the money for this.
Speaker 3:We visited 84 different assemblies and castles. That's where the money 85% of the money comes from. That I mean the amateur astronomers have been great, helped us. I met Diane Ternchig and she's going to be providing formal training for the veterans so that they can learn astronomy.
Speaker 6:Her pretty loves the sky and the moon looking at it. I think everybody should see the dark night sky. It's entrancing, makes you feel big, but it also makes you feel small, and if you have problems they are also infinitesimal. Tiny little specks in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 1:So that's a little clip from a recent video by Knights of Columbus showing how they were able to pull together this observatory in Pittsburgh. And I've always thought the main reason people don't actually enjoy nights because they don't have a way to engage with it, and it's like those folks who whine and complain about winter. Right, you know, there are those of us who indulge in winter activities. You know, skiing, skating, like TSU guys, climbing I don't know if you're able to do that out there and you told that much. You know. What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts? Is it because if you have a reason to enjoy night, you're going to actually appreciate it more? I assume right, I mean, it seems logical.
Speaker 4:I think if you offer people the opportunity to here's the challenge to get out of their comfort zone, right?
Speaker 4:A lot of people have a misunderstanding about what dark night's guides are and, in relation to that, what dark sky advocacy means.
Speaker 4:Most people think that when you propose dark skies and light mitigation strategies, that you turn off all the lights and that will decrease safety and the bad guys will come out of the woodworks and the break into your homes and crime rates will increase on the street. None of this which has been proven by data about public health. So these hurdles need to be overcome, and I think education is the biggest contributor to the welfare of a society. So when you have the opportunity to educate people about what dark skies means that our ancestors have had a cultural and spiritual connection to the dark skies and that we can have the same, all of these benefits will improve your mental and your physical health, and then people might think about the night sky differently and change their behavior, which I'm very hopeful for humanity. That will lead down the road to a changing of our behavior in terms of burning fossil fuels, because that's really the biggest problem. It's a one-way road that we're driving down, with dire consequences for all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, matias, when you talk about the education side, you know something I just got into and it's essentially nocturnal burning and it's another way you actually focus on your senses and the environment. Right, because you get to learn about so much of what's going on just from an audio standpoint. You know, and it's one of those things that we don't engage enough at night. There's not enough education on what goes on. You start seeing night zoos become big right, because people want to see what the animals do at night. You start seeing night hikes become kind of the thing this past summer, because people want to hear creatures they don't usually hear or actually see. What is it like when the switch is turned off?
Speaker 5:I think also another piece of this is urban astronomy. You know, most people live in cities and most people can't see the Milky Way, but there are some great urban astronomy programs and I was in New York City, I was in Times Square, which I think you know has about the same light levels as daylight at night, and there was a guy there with a telescope and he had some filters some light pollution filters on and he was showing people, you know, the planets and people were lining up for a block to look through this telescope. So the idea that you have to be, you know, in southern Utah or you know the Colorado Plateau to see really nice guys, you know you can instill that curiosity and that inspiration for the night sky by setting up telescopes in urban areas, where that's where the people are right. So I think that's a big part of that. You know, getting people engaged more with the night sky is to go where the people are and set up programs there.
Speaker 4:Right, it was to do outreach with the amateur astronomer the Association of New York, the Astronomy Club there and we went to Lincoln Center, right outside the opera. We had our telescopes and we had people look through the telescopes at Saturn and they thought this is a trick For instance, a little sticker in front of the telescope. They were mesmerized by what they saw. This is Saturn. These are the rings. This is amazing. How come we can see it here in New York City? Well, it's called a telescope. You can see things near that are very far away and you can see the planets in the sky, the naked eye planets. There are five of them and it's one way to make people think right, you don't have to plant the seed for them to go home and maybe the next day tell their colleagues. You can't imagine what I saw last night at the opera. I looked through a telescope at Saturn and this is, like you know, this domino effect. Hopefully will make people think a little bit differently about the night sky.
Speaker 5:Yeah, when I was in Manhattan, I took a little bit of video of people's reaction when they looked through the telescope. It was great. I have to find it somewhere. I put it on my website or something, but it was such a cool response that you were getting from people looking through the telescope. It was just, you know, some of them were almost like on a verge of tears. It was so exciting and they couldn't believe that they were actually seeing Saturn and Jupiter and the moons. So it's a really powerful effect because those people are much more likely to care about the night sky now and they're more likely to go to the west and see a really dark sky and do some astrotourism things like that. So I think that's a you know, I think it's great to draw people into the dark sky areas, but I think trying to instill that sense of amazement and awe in an urban area where you have, you know, tens of millions of people living is the way to go.
Speaker 1:And people are starting to notice. When they go out there and they see the sky, they're starting to make that connection between why they don't see as much as they could see going out to a dark sky reserve and then coming back to where they live. They're starting to make that connection. Now, who knows how it's going to play out, but they're. You know, the connection is starting to be made.
Speaker 4:So it's the best people to bring to tears by looking through a telescope in New York where actually the Jets fans, because they really used to being brought to tears by something that they see.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know. I can't speak much of that because the Eagles lost to the Jets last week, but that was embarrassing. We won't talk much further on that one. Moving on to ecology, there's big, big news this month, very sad news coming out of Chicago. Percy had had more than 1000 birds killed in one night at one Chicago building, mccormick Place. I should note that other sources cited just under 1000, but the impact remains somewhere around 1000. Mccormick Place is the convention center complex in Chicago and it has a gruesome history of bird deaths. Over the past 40 years McCormick Place has killed 40,000 birds from MPR.
Speaker 1:The Lights Out program in Chicago is great, provided no one actually has to obey the guidelines for turning off their lights at night. Well, that's a glaring problem for Lights Out and I know Lights Out has been really big push over the past year or two. Really, since COVID it's been a really big push. In many cities in America the McCormick Place cites good intentions, except for when they have events taking place. Then all bets are off. Lights are on all time and Lights Out just becomes a nice idea for people when it doesn't interfere with any of their projects in their life. While Chicago's Lights Out is voluntary.
Speaker 1:New York appears to be trying to push through a more I guess you could say statutory approach to it, and the C-1039 would mandate a Lights Out program. Legislation would impact lower and midtown Manhattan, where a majority of bird deaths actually occur, according to Audubon NYC. The legislation is actually able to answer many complaints that the real estate industry has about Lights Out, including. Let's take a look at these. These are good Small business exemption, landmark exemption any building over 20 stories can apply for a waiver. Security lighting for aircraft. That's logical, that makes sense, and I can see this one being misused. The infamous public safety out, namely that interior and exterior lighting should be kept on to provide safety for employees when they're in the building. And, let's be honest, who's going to turn the lights off when people are working? It's not when you're going to be working that you have to wonder how this is going to be abused. So, nonetheless, is this a good start? Are we going down the right road here? Is this good?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think you know. It just sinkens me that the McCormick Place is still killing as many birds as it does. I mean it was back in like the 70s when ornithologists got a tip about the birds hitting the windows at that building, and it was in 1978, and that ornithologist, david Willard, was the first to start documenting the birds killed at that building. And it's just shocking that here we are, like you know, just 60, 50 years later almost that they're still killing birds left and right at that building. I mean it's something that really needs to be done. But I think the other thing that strikes me up on the agenda about bird strikes is that you know we've known about lights and birds for 100 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's going back to the turn of the century.
Speaker 5:Yep, there was a paper in 1918, it was called the Destruction of Birds and Lighthouses on the coast of California. It was the name of the paper, and in that paper the authors talked about a lighthouse in Mendocino County that saw a thousand bird collisions per month during the migration season.
Speaker 5:They also in that article talked about reports of birds dying in much greater numbers at lighthouses in Europe.
Speaker 5:So this is something that we've known about. You know, there have been reports of lots of birds back in the early 1900s dying on lighthouses on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic coast. And it's not just. I mean there have been some more recent examples of, you know, just massive bird mortality, and in it was September 12th in 1937, 576 birds slammed into the Washington Monument in an hour and a half, oh my God. And then, more recently, about 400 birds were killed in a single light in 2007, when they collided with the 23 story American National Insurance building in Galveston, texas. You know, you see these they're, whether satellite imagery or not, satellite, whether radar, images of clouds of birds flying across the Gulf of Mexico right into Texas, right into Galveston, and you know so we're talking about millions of birds flying over overhead and and it's it's just kind of sickening that we're still not doing anything about these just massive, you know, bird kills. So I think it's and Frank it's, you know, or my place is just notorious for this too.
Speaker 1:Frank, with what you're saying there. It's not that you you can still have light at night. No one's saying that. You know you have to turn off all the lights in the city. The lights that are are at fault here are decorative, like they're not useful lights. They're not lights that are actually providing services to people. Here in Philadelphia we have the Comcast tower. It's a glow stick that birds just fly into and die. There's no purpose to the light. It's just decorative. It doesn't. It's not going to hurt anyone if you turn it off.
Speaker 5:There are things we can do to make lighted buildings less of a hazard for birds. There are ways you can light. You know putting blinds if it's internal lighting, putting blinds or something over the windows to reduce the brightness of the lights. You know turning off. You know making sure the lights are aimed correctly, making sure the color temperature is appropriate. All those things will reduce bird strikes. You know, maybe they won't eliminate it, but we can certainly do things to minimize those types of events.
Speaker 4:It's amazing and ironic that birds are the last remaining dinosaurs. I just looked up the number. Depending on what source you look at, there are between 50 billion and 400 billion birds on our planet, and when we read about numbers where tens of thousands of birds are killed during migration because they slam into buildings that are lit up that don't have to be, we just have to realize the effects of all our behavior. This is not rocket science, no pun intended. To use and follow the lighting principles that are being promoted by the Dark Sky Association, that all of us can do right, and you don't have to be a wealthy person or live in the wealthy western to do a few things to help the wildlife and yourself. And unfortunately, these news are drowned out by the daily news cycle of what bad things are going on in the world, by what humans are doing to each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's no shortage of that. Yeah Well, that's just straight too far from the topic of birds and Alan, but maybe this is something that we need to adopt. So evidently, resident birds, namely the Carolina random northern Cardinal, have adapted to their bright environments by simply having their eyes shrink, so maybe that's a solution, maybe that's what we need, and we will enjoy our light polluted lights much better.
Speaker 2:Here. I was just in my Dollar General a couple weeks ago and they have lots of lights on it, of course, and they had a couple of kiddie pools outside, and those kiddie pools were actually filling up with dead insects from the lights, Wow Geez. So insects are a number one food source for a lot of birds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got a great point there, ben. That's exactly insects are heavily impacted by light. We actually have an article here on what cat is flies, right? So researchers in freshwater biology assessed LED's impact across 26 cat is fly species, and cat flies are usually kind of a sign of ecological health. They're nocturnal insect that uses lunar light as a navigation point. Per the study, realization of LED temperatures around 4,000 Kelvin or below appear to be healthiest for these insects, with a side note that female cat is flies appear to be more sensitive to light temperature than males. And again, it's like really no one size solution to fixing any problems with insects, right? So the study also mentioned when they did this, they used light that was 100 times less than street light brightness. So to your point, ben, and I know the lights you're talking about with the Dollar General these are very, very intense lights, although the temperature may vary between place to place, but they're very intense lights. And then the insects that usually moths and your mayflies, when I just get caught up in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I live right next to the river and insects are a major source of food for our fish, and all those insects are getting pulled off the river onto the land by the lights, so it is a major, major effect.
Speaker 1:It definitely is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There was a study that and I'm reading go out back that female mayflies typically lay their eggs on water and they use sort of the I think it's ultraviolet reflection from water like streams and lakes and rivers, to find where to lay their eggs and find water like that. It turns out that light reflecting off of asphalt generates the same ultraviolet cues that tricks the mayflies into landing on the pavement and depositing their eggs. So there are pictures of this one bridge that has no street lights over it and there are millions of mayflies just all over the top of this bridge because they think that the light reflecting off the asphalt is actually water, and so they end up laying their eggs there and then getting killed. So yeah, it's a big issue and there are things like that that just serve these unintended consequences of lighting things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, did you guys see this one? There's an NPR piece that similarly, how sea turtles actually understand light. So there's an NPR piece that looked at how they look to see how hatchlings gravitate towards light and what they can do to kind of build more protections for them. As you guys have known from just listening to this show that there's many communities that actually implement ecological friendly lighting on the shores. However, sea turtles still don't make it from hatchling to adult and the common thread in that is that you have places on the coast that still have resistance to implementing ecologically safe nighttime practices within their facility. So the light is extending outward over onto the beach and, as it pertains to turtles, a Savannah State Marine science professor, chris Hins, is actually working forward on numbers behind how hatchlings see the world. So he uses long exposure shots from nesting sites. Hins and his team actually developed a special program that will convert the images and how science understands what the turtles would see. So in this case, since turtles are more sensitive to blue than humans, are the images visually have a blue hue and then, with occasional saturation points where they can actually see a light source poking its head out.
Speaker 1:I should note that artificial light at night impacts sea turtles more than just from the hatchling perspective and, frank, you probably know this. Female sea turtles specifically seek out dark places to shore, to nest in. There's no shortage of ecological issues that pop up with light. But, ben, I wanted to hear your take on this one because there's another article. I came across, the Journal of Urban Ecology. I had a study in it that looked at how urban sprawl impacted wildlife. They used 104 motion-activated cameras in rural and suburban locations up in New Hampshire and the team looked at 13 species, including the bobcat, coyote, fisher, white-tailed deer and more, and it appeared that there was no uniformity in how animals behaved when adapting to human incursions, such as having 24-7 daylight. Bobcats and fishers became less nocturnal, while coyotes and deer became more. Ben, what's life out for you?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2:When we first moved out here, one of the first things I noticed and I'm going back to the insect thing is that all the bugs were bigger out here and there were just more of them, and there was also a lot more wildlife, just like at night. For example, I have four skunks in my backyard, and well, actually there's five of them now, but they just trounced around at night, mostly on a full moon night, whereas when there's no moon, I don't get any animals at night. Oh, interesting, ok. And also I have a lot of deer that walk through my backyard because I find droppings the next morning and they're very much nocturnal. Ok, I never, ever see them in the daytime, but they're always there at night. So deer are actually colorblind and they don't see lights the way we do. However, with these new LED lights being so broad spectrum, they're having a much bigger effect on nighttime deer activity than previous lights were in the past, because deer were actually blind to a lot of the frequency that you and I see with our eyes. Interesting.
Speaker 1:So do you know what they see? Do you know band, I guess?
Speaker 2:They always see in two wavelengths. One of them is UV and the other one's like a yellow light.
Speaker 1:Ok, so is this because a lot of the new LED fixtures might be put off? Uv? Yeah, wow, that's something right there.
Speaker 5:The study that I was reading about. It showed that deer on the urban wildland interface they're kind of used to having lights around or actually show preference for highly lit areas for foraging. So at night they'll go into these urban and more suburban areas and forage because the stuff there is greener and tastier and so they're really drawn to that kind of environment. And then there was always an understanding that it was safer for them in terms of predation by mountain lions in those areas. So that was hypothesized why they would forage in more urban areas and hide areas with more light.
Speaker 5:But it turns out that the mountain lions again who live on that urban wildland interface aren't deterred by lit areas at all. So the deer going into these areas that have a lot of light are actually drawing more mountain lions into these areas and so there's been an increase in mountain lion human interactions because of that. So again, these sort of unintended consequences of lighting. Right, you would think that, oh, there's no way a mountain lion is going to come into a lit area, so you're safer. But in reality you're drawing deer into your lit area and those deer are bringing mountain lions. So you're actually putting yourself at more risk of encountering a mountain lion than you would if you didn't have a light.
Speaker 1:Frank, we always think we're safer in the light. Right, there's no way anything's going to happen. We're in light Exactly there you go. That's even for animals. That's great, that's a good little.
Speaker 4:One of the worst things that has happened to light management in the last 10 years is the distribution of these highly efficient blue LED lights. Blue LED lights scatter much more easily. They are a significant source of light pollution. They're energy efficient, which reduces energy costs, which is a good thing. However, these LED lights now are way too bright. You could have a lot less intense LED lights and still save even more money. These are one of the things, like Frank said, the unintended consequences of our actions. To turn back the clock is really difficult. This will take a concerted effort by not just industry but also by the utilities companies that have the domain over the street and neighborhood lights, and convincing a utility to do something that moves like an ocean cruise. That are really going to be difficult. Good luck, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, keeping in line with your thoughts there, matias. Street lighting is interesting. The way we think about lights from a community standpoint is interesting. There's a community up in Wyoming which we have small towns. These small communities want to preserve the rural character which they include a nighttime and natural night. We have a community up there, lander Wyoming, which is around 7,500 people and they're trying to switch over to LED street lighting. However, they're actually trying to do it in a responsible way and give responsible covers to keep the light aimed directly where it needs to be, try and get community input on where they feel like they need more intensity, less intensity, see if they can actually bring down the lights over the course of the night.
Speaker 1:When you get to in a wee hours, when no one's out there, you don't need to have as much light before. There's just not as much foot traffic or you're downtown, not as busy. However, this contrasts greatly with places like North Pole of Virginia, which so you're just going to get these new ultra-bright lights and you're going to like it. You're not even going to get a shield on it. You don't have a choice of getting a shield on it. Or you have, say, in Frederick, maryland, which was very much the same, but they would give you some shielding so it wouldn't go in your house, which is very kind of that. Why is there this big discrepancy between small communities and large areas that should, in theory, have more human capital? With more of a, they should have much more to draw from. Why don't they do any of this like work?
Speaker 4:The community of Springdale, which is a gateway community designed at National Park, became a dark sky community in July. It took a long time for them to go down this path and execute their dark sky program and light management, especially the public lights, but it was possible to get the citizens on board because they all share the same space. Now, if you have a larger community, for example a few cities that are close by, or Las Vegas, let's go back to the sphere. People live in different neighborhoods, right? So the people in the northern part of Las Vegas versus the people in Henderson? How can you, are you going to community by community? How can you convince your neighbors and say we're wasting energy, we're wasting money? Look at the night sky. It's so beautiful. I just saw the stars while I was up at Cedar Breaks over the weekend, and your neighbor is probably going to look at you dumbfounded and has this innate sense of dark. Dark means fear, right?
Speaker 1:Dark is like fear and it's not good, so it seems like Matias, you lived in New York way too long.
Speaker 4:I did. I saw more stars on Broadway than in the night sky, but I wasn't really aware of. I mean, I was aware that we didn't see stars because I traveled around the world and I saw the night skies, but until I moved out to you, I was not aware of this amazing effort that the park service, the state parks, the local communities have undertaken by preserving this dark skies, and people come out here on a regular basis for our public programs and they're blown away. But we need a lot more to be blown away, not just the few thousand people that come here in the summer. I think it's just noise. There's so many issues for people to care about in their daily lives. Light management is probably really low on their wish list.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think you have more competing interests in larger communities. I think it comes down to that, and any kind of political change in a larger jurisdiction is always going to be a little more challenging because you have to deal with a lot of competing interests.
Speaker 1:Frank, I would say in these large communities it's much more. To me it seems very bureaucratic and there's a lot less direct democratic interaction. There's a lot less one for one. So what happens is you have a organization of government who has no tie to the citizens, right? They don't have to worry about any elections or anything. They're just a bureaucratic institution. They can do whatever they feel is the best interest of the city without having any input on what's coming from and how the individual neighborhoods will prefer to have certain setups. That's how it comes across to me. I don't know.
Speaker 5:I would agree with that too. I mean you are in a smaller community. You are dealing more on a one-to-one basis with people, as opposed to a larger jurisdiction is where you may have a larger bureaucracy and more layers and more stakeholders, and all of that gets more complex and it's just a little more challenging to get any kind of policy or approach past.
Speaker 1:And I wonder about the culture of some of these organizations too, be it a utility or be it a streets department or some organization that's responsible for helping provide just basic rudimentary lighting and road safety and whatnot. And I wonder about the people who get placed in those positions. So people who are hired in, do you guys know? Is this something? And, frank, you might be being in the educational sector do city planners, do civic engineers have any kind of environmental background?
Speaker 5:Yeah, and I think there's a definitely city planners than to have. A lot of times it's landscape architecture or they do have some environmental coursework and requirements in their job descriptions, but I think they, like any other position, are subject to like, as I was talking about before, that political influence and I think that's kind of the driver for a lot of the decision-making that happens. When I was talking before about politicians sort of being able to sense the political wins and act in a way that's going to enhance their opportunities get reelected, and sometimes that overbrides the financial influence from interest groups, but sometimes it doesn't. So sometimes the money does talk right and I think maybe in larger communities, larger jurisdictions, it's a little easier to go, or the politics that may be more likely to respond to the financial interests that help them get reelected.
Speaker 4:Yeah, does anybody know about that? When I was at the League Observatory for a visit I think it's San Jose they put into effect some regulation to preserve the darkness by not switching to LED lights. They have a distinct yellow glow I think the high pressure sodium bulbs that they still use, which help maintain the skies for science at the League Observatory. I wonder if anybody has any knowledge about that and how that works. Or maybe when people listen to the podcast they can comment.
Speaker 1:I'm not aware of Frank. Are you aware?
Speaker 5:I know around, like Tucson and Flagstaff and other communities that have observatories nearby, they do prefer, I think as far as my knowledge goes, they do prefer the more amber lights. So they do prefer the high pressure sodiums. They're trying to prevent the wholesale transition to LEDs because of the blue spike and Ben knows that it's easier to deal with light pollution from high pressure sodium or something in that amber range than it is to get the broad spectrum light from LEDs. It's much more difficult to remove that from astronomical images. So it may be changing now, but I think that in the past observatories preferred the low pressure, high pressure sodium lights because of the amber color, the warmer colors.
Speaker 2:On Hawaii Island all of these street lights are amber, which is it's interesting, because they have a completely different culture too about lights over there, Like I think it's ingrained partly because the observatory, but everyone thinks like, oh, you don't turn lights on your property because then people can see what you had to steal.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's true yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, how would you guys like an actual street light in your house? There's, you can actually get for an ungodly amount of money something that a light fixture inside that will stand up called the standing lamp marble, and it's a domestic light that actually has all the aesthetic curves of street light. I mentioned this because there was a article or actually, I guess, a cause at White Paper that came out looking at how street lights are actually going to change the way we think of our cities. And it's not just that. You know, right here we're talking about what kind of lighting fixtures or we should be using, or how do different communities respond to lighting.
Speaker 1:Street lights are going to be talking. They're going to be part of a network, right, they're going to be saying, hey, there's some open parking spots here, the city can generate more revenue. Hey, here's the weather in this area. Here's what you know the temperature of 32 degrees, 33 degrees, 31 degrees over here. Traffic volume, air quality meters, noise, pollution violations. It's going to be doing everything. They're not going to be less street lights. If they can do all this, there's not going to be less street lights. You're going to have more street lights. Here in Philly, they have aggressive plans for installing cameras on live street lights. I think they even pass some kind of. I think the city even put in an effect, some kind of a privacy code or some other stuff. I wasn't informed on it, but you know, being a citizen, I guess that's not something you need to worry about.
Speaker 5:Did you guys hear? Did you guys heard of li-fi? Like li-fi. So li-fi is the provision of, so you get internet access, but it comes through the light of street lights, so neighborhoods will get access to the internet through their street lights. It's been several years since this has kind of hit the news and I'm sure it's moving forward. So that's part of what you're talking about.
Speaker 5:So you can get that you'll get your internet access through the street lights, through this Wi-Fi system, which is kind of crazy. It really is moving that way. There are some really cool features of some of these systems too. For street lights, you can have emergency services have access to controls of the street lights, so if your house makes a 911 call, the street light outside of your house will flash and then the driver of the ambulance or fire truck or whatever will be able to pinpoint exactly where your house is, because the light outside your house will be flashing. So there's all kinds of really innovative features to those types of lighting systems that we're going to be seeing in the future.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, it's all about the change. This could be much more intrusive in every which way. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The police are going to be able to dim certain lights in a neighborhood. If there's a convict or somebody that they're trying to identify or find, they'll turn on, they'll increase the brightness of these lights and turn down the brightness of these lights. So they'll be able to manipulate all of that with their phone, basically. So it's something on the horizon.
Speaker 1:Wow, the more network society. Here we come, man, I've been having such a great time with you guys that we've been just I didn't realize how far into the show We've been only for like an hour and a half now.
Speaker 1:So, I want to give you guys a little chance to speak about yourselves and then we have some few good articles to wrap up with. But yeah, thank you guys. This is a great show and I really appreciate having all of you guys on so real fast. Before I give you guys the introduction, just want to remind people at home if you want to find anything discussed in the show, including the actual original script for the show, we have it over at light pollution newscom where you can see all the links and transcripts excellent resource and love it.
Speaker 1:If you say hi to us. You can find us over at Instagram at light pollutionnews, over at LinkedIn at light pollution news or Reddit at light pollution news. Or you can just email me directly at bill at light pollution newscom and you have any kind of. You know you want to follow up with Matias's question earlier or if you have any kind of great articles or things you'd like to share, just feel free to drop a line. I'd love to talk. So, ben, you started with Ash of Tiger, the film camera. That blows my mind and I'm not a digital native. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2:It was so much harder in the film today's, so much harder. I mean that was before guiding was in existence, so you had to have a second scope there with a reticle in it, it was illuminated and you had to guide by hand. Imagine that. I can't imagine that. And then on top of that, like gradients were impossible. I mean, if there was a gradient in your image, there was just no way to get rid of it because you know, we didn't have background extraction or gradient extract or any of that kind of stuff Like we do in today's software. And then another thing was hard was focus. I mean you could get focus through the viewfinder, but often the viewfinder was not tuned to the actual distance of the film plane of your lens, yeah. And so you didn't know if your image is in focus or not until you developed it.
Speaker 1:So how many successful shots did you have, Ben? I'm curious about the ratio here.
Speaker 2:Ah, you used to use about one in 10.
Speaker 1:Now are you talking about just setting up a camera to take long exposure photos of, say, the Orion Nebula? Is that what's going on here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually it was one in 10 successful shots and also, like back then, you took one image usually because it was having long exposure.
Speaker 2:It wasn't stacks of images Like we do digitally. We do short exposures, and that was actually one of the hardest things to wrap your head around In the beginning it was. Everyone was like, oh my goodness, you got to take all these separate images, and nobody had done it that way before. It had always been one long exposure. And you had to hypersensitize your film too, which meant that you basically put it in a cooler and bombarded it with this gas that dropped its temperature drastically, and there's all sorts of chemistry involved with it that way, and I guess you can't do it on a windy night.
Speaker 2:No, no, that's what Dome's ruled.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a lot of grit. It's character builder right there.
Speaker 2:It was tough in those days, really tough. We have it so much easier today.
Speaker 1:Well, ben, even with the narrow band it's still a lot easier. It's just, I guess, more time consuming, right? It just takes a little longer.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's so much easier. I would never go back to the film days.
Speaker 1:Ben real fast. Why don't you tell people where they can find you and learn about the narrow band channel All?
Speaker 2:right. So I have a YouTube channel called the narrow band channel and basically on there I talk about three different topics astrophotography with a Mac, astrophotography with four thirds cameras and then also narrow band imaging.
Speaker 1:So, frank, why don't you tell people where they can go out and learn about what you do?
Speaker 5:In addition to my website, the Night Sky Resource Center, I also have an Instagram account where I post all of my astrophotography as I complete them, I guess, the website. I've been working on a new post that's related to a program that I did this summer called the Astronomy and Chile Educator Ambassador Program and it's ASAP for short. In ASAP we got to go down to Chile and see some of the best, biggest and most amazing telescopes in the world both optical telescopes, radio telescopes, infrared telescopes just incredible pieces of technology. It was put on by consortium of organizations and universities that do a lot of research down there. In return for this behind the scenes tour of these facilities, we need to go back to the US and do some presentations that they're working on in Chile and basically why we're investing all this money and time and effort into a country in South America.
Speaker 5:We went to a series of observatories in a place called Cerro Tololo in Chile, another one just nearby called Cerro Pachon. Cerro Pachon has some amazing telescopes like Gemini South. It's basically a twin of a telescope in Hawaii called Gemini North, so the two scopes are the Gemini scopes, doing some just amazing astronomy. Another one there is called SOAR SOAR can't remember what it stands for, then you can look it up. Another just newly cutting edge telescope down there, that's, in some of the darkest guys in the world. Then there's the Rubin telescope, which is coming online next year. That will be doing a full-sky survey, just continuously, over and over again. So within a few days we'll be able to see if anything is changed. You can't see that we also went to another observatory, radio astronomy observatory called OMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.
Speaker 1:Wow, what did you do down there, Frank?
Speaker 5:Did you miss?
Speaker 1:anything you missed? I don't know.
Speaker 5:It was incredible, it was a trip of a lifetime.
Speaker 5:So at OMA they were part of the group of observatories that image the first black hole, and so they're part of that group of instruments.
Speaker 5:So, anyway, it was an incredible experience, and so what I'm writing about right now hopefully this will drop in the next month or so is this idea of our curiosity of humans. The night sky has always been a source of curiosity for us all, the way back from our distant ancestors, who may have been sitting around a campfire on the African savannah looking up at the night sky wondering what all those lights are. That same curiosity has continued through millennia and resulted in those amazing telescopes that I saw in Chile. So millions of dollars and countless hours have been invested in an attempt to just satisfy that same curiosity. To draw on that straight line yeah, exactly, it's that curiosity that drives us to study the night sky, and basically we were trying to answer the same questions about those tiny little specs of life that we saw when we were just living on savannah in Africa. So that's my next blog post and, again, hopefully that'll drop soon.
Speaker 1:Looking very much forward to that. Yeah, can't wait. Keep us in a loop, frank Over, we'll do it. Let's see us, man, jack of all trades. Last of none, what is going on with the National Park Service and with some great things you can tell us?
Speaker 4:I encourage people to go visit their National Park in their vicinity. Go visit their state park and go to the dark sky website to see if there are any dark sky parks in their vicinity where they live. Just sit out in your backyard and look at the sky, or when you go camping, and just be to try to be mindful when you're outside at night. They have plenty of free apps that you can hold up and see out what the sprite light is, whether it's a planet or a star or a satellite or a UFO. Actually, you know, I think when they fly by our solar system with their space technology, they just lock their doors because they don't want any one of us to look at in there. But yeah, the night sky is about connecting with our ancestry and with our natural cycles of seasons and day and night. We all benefit from using a little less light and being open with each other a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to Ben's point earlier. You know your sleep is so much better. You know people. It's a thing that people wear masks to bed, right, because they don't have any dark place in their apartment or their house wherever they're at. Yeah, all right. Well, I only have three more articles here. That's it, guys, but these are Google's first off, ben, next summer, if I roll in with a Mustang Mach E that has a U shaped LED ring on its roof, how would you feel?
Speaker 2:Well, first off, I've always wanted a Mustang Again, I've already had one, but I'd probably be like that's pretty obnoxious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Ford is toying with the idea of putting a lit ring around the exterior of their roof, and it's not going to be just a Mach E, but still, this is all speculation, what they're trying to do with it.
Speaker 2:But this is the helicopters can see the car. I don't know there was many years ago policemen. The lights on the roofs were in the shape of a V and it was cool because from the side and from the front you could see the lights, but also from the helicopter in the air you could see what direction the cop car was going. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this one. One idea is that could signify when you have auto is in the human control driving activated. Also, I'm sure there's going to be some aesthetical appeal to it. People are going to want to play with the lighting. Or it could be a charge, say red not charged, green charged.
Speaker 2:We'll see and find a way to put those LED strips anywhere it's so cheap and at work we use them all the time and, like I'm in the trade show exhibit industry and we put them everywhere now and everything is so freaking right now, everybody's booth is white and you just get lost in this sea of brightness. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I feel like over time it's going to have dimmable elements, students. Right Right now it's kind of like the beginning of the technology. You know it's all gone mainstream, super cheap, but hopefully over the next few years, you know, you'll see more thoughtfulness with it. I don't know, Ben, do you feel like the expo industry will be as thoughtful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question for my dad because he's really in the cars and he knows the industry well, but I'm kind of clueless as to like the kind of I tell you what if it makes the car. I know my dad told me this one time. He was like if you put chrome in a car, a car will sell, and if LED is the future of chrome, it's going to sell.
Speaker 1:It could be. I know we have all these which have the rear I believe is the brake lights actually can change. You have different settings. You can set up for an LED screen because you have OLEDs back there. Yeah, it's, there's going to be some kind of light technology into this, but yeah, I don't even know if you can ever turn it off at some point. You know, right, If you have all electric vehicles, so should be interesting.
Speaker 2:The hardest part will be learning how to turn it off, because these cars are so complicated now.
Speaker 1:You're so right on that. We got a brand new outback and I still can't figure out where some of the lights are. I know there's light coming from different areas, but I, you know. So you're on a field on a dark night, surrounded by, you know, 50 or 100 of your closest friends and my wife.
Speaker 2:Honda has one switch in the top roof that turns every light off in the car. Wow, and it was like somebody, why Honda? Wow, that's great. It's just one switch and it turns every light off in the car inside and outside of the car. Design design for us photographers, I know, I know, when we went to Cherry Springs I had no worries because I was like just to flip that switch and we're good.
Speaker 1:I always have worries. Well, here's another piece of technological envy. So you'll see a lot of lighting manufacturers offer this now. Yuffie, for instance, is offering permanent programmable outdoor lighting that you can paint your house, trees and the sides of your neighbor's house in colors all seasons, for all holidays. Essentially, it's programmable lights that the advertises being the, you know you make your house look like a nonstop Disneyland year round and you know it's all on an app on your phone and you can decide what you want every different sector to look like. And this holiday season coming soon and maybe not leaving ever is a full color homes. I don't know if any of you guys live in areas where you have a lot of people.
Speaker 4:Is this like National Lab Pools Christmas Vacation, where the Griswold turned on the 500,000 light?
Speaker 1:bulbs. It's yep, you got it. Let's see us get on.
Speaker 4:And there's nothing like pop culture. The Germans love watching American movies. I grew up with it and it's it's like a competition, right? And who has the best lighting in the between things that people don't even make for Thanksgiving anymore to put up their Christmas lighting? It's what? Why are we competing with each other, right, to have the better outdoor lighting? You know, I have Santa Claus with a full lit up sled and the seven reindeer with the blinking red nose. I mean one night a year, right? Just like we have an international dark sky day or dark sky week where we turn off lights. You have like you go all out one night a year, the day before Christmas, light up the whole town for one night here and then stop. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Well, the good news is this this technology just these programmable LEDs will be year round, so once you set it up, you can just keep reusing it. Awesome, perfect, yeah, all right. Final story today this one I really love. This is my favorite story of the whole month, without doubts the coolest story of the month. So the Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Williamsburg, michigan, has a love affair with the night sky. This isn't in some remote part of the US either. It's adjacent to Traverse City, michigan.
Speaker 1:The church, which was built in 2020, was specified to design to allow for enjoying the night sky. Father Cyprian Streza, pastor of the parish, has a smartphone app that can turn off all the lights, includes interior, exterior, even parking lot lights. On night's reference in the article, folks of his congregation will come together to watch northern lights and a fire pit behind the church and unfortunately, per the article, that night that they discussed this was it was clouding out, but Streza believes that this ability to witness something so impressive aligns with his Greek Orthodox theology. Per the article, we believe that in this deep stillness we encounter God. That's when the stillness becomes active. So active stillness is the fundamental in our spiritual experience. That's awesome. I'm going to leave you guys with that one. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 5:I think it's all good to make sure it goes back to awe. Right, it's. The night sky is the most awe-inspiring resource we have. In my opinion, and you know, it's one thing to look at the Grand Canyon and be in awe, but to look at the night sky and really think about it is just awe-inspiring. And awe has always been historically associated with God and spirituality and the mind. So I think that's what they're driving at, is they're creating that sense of awe in people and that's driving them to worship.
Speaker 4:I have the Bivalent feelings about this. I have to say. I love connecting with people, whatever they found. However, they find that we do the night sky, and I grew up Catholic. I'm no longer following a monotheistic religion and if it works, great. You know, I have found that when I talk about the universe and I say it's 13.8 billion years old and Earth's and the solar system 4.5 billion, and people come and say, well, the Bible says the Earth is 6,000 years old and they keep harping about it and they try to drive their religious views into my program, then I get annoyed because I don't go to church and stand up and say the sign says the universe is 13.8 billion years old. So but I go with Frank. You know, I want to be open-minded. I'm an American citizen. I accept all views and I treasure the difference in views that we can have. If you can find a common ground and find the all in the universe through stillness and dark skies. If on the second step, some people see God, I see another spiritual source, I'm all for it.
Speaker 1:There we have it, matthias Ben Frank. Thank you so much for joining the show and a great one, really, really thankful for you guys. We record the light pollution news podcast once a month on Sundays around 4pm Eastern time. You can find us pretty much everywhere, even on YouTube, just by searching light pollution news. Gentlemen, I hope you had as much fun as I did. I love recording Sundays. This is my favorite time of the month, so thank you so much, guys. Closing out, I'm your host, bill McGeaney. I hope in the shed of light only wears needed. Have a great and safe November, everyone, and for those of you celebrating happy early Thanksgiving,