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Host Bill McGeeney is joined by Shane Ludtke of the Actual Astronomy Podcast, Jeff Buler of the Aeroecology Lab at the University of Delaware, and Matthias Schmitt of Cedar Breaks National Monument.
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What did you think of this Episode? Text Us!
Host Bill McGeeney is joined by Shane Ludtke of the Actual Astronomy Podcast, Jeff Buler of the Aeroecology Lab at the University of Delaware, and Matthias Schmitt of Cedar Breaks National Monument.
See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!
Bill's Picks:
Like what we're doing? For the cost of coffee, you can become a Monthly Supporter? Your assistance will help cover server and production costs.
light pollution news may 2024. Radio aeroecology. Incredibly enlightening show on birds today joining me from the university of delaware aeroecology lab, mr jeff bueller. From the actual astronomy podcast, mr shane lookkey, and making his triumphant return after finding a dark orb in the sky, mr Matthias Schmidt, we talk birds, eclipses and are you interested in purchasing land in a dark sky sanctuary? Well, listen up.
Bill McGeeney:The new Life Pollution News, the monthly podcast where we talk about the news as it pertains to light pollution. Light Pollution News is, first and foremost, a discussion where we aim not just to keep you up to date on the news, but facilitate conversation around the topics affecting light pollution. I'm your host, bill McGinney, and, as always, I'm thrilled to have a fun slate of guests with me today Joining us all the way from Saskatchewan. One of my favorite podcast shows that is running right now Mr Sean Luca of the Actual Astronomy Podcast. If you've never heard of the Actual Astronomy Podcast and you're a true and true amateur astronomer, I highly recommend you take a listen.
Bill McGeeney:The Actual Astronomy Podcast is a show built first and foremost by amateur astronomers. For other amateur astronomers, shane, it's great to see you again. And for those of you unaware, I was recently lucky enough to be on the actual astronomy podcast. Now I got to say you guys, actually you guys impress me quite a bit because your shows are really good, they're very detailed and you record like twice a week. How do you get any observing in? How does that work?
Shane Ludtke:Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words and good to see you again, bill, but there's many episodes where we're there in body but not in mind, because we were observing all night and we're pretty darn tired. But you know, we were both somewhat fortunate, I guess, in that we don't have children, so we have all this free time and we can dedicate it towards recording some podcasts.
Bill McGeeney:You guys do a great job. I always and I think I said this before we were recording on your side that you guys are kind of like the sky and telescope put in podcast form, a nice detail you go into. I know your recent one who was the fellow he's been on it before in the clusters, on the globular clusters.
Shane Ludtke:Oh.
Bill McGeeney:Peter Jedeke, A great episode. As someone who's an astronomy nerd, I loved it. These are things that I think about, things that I go out there just like Chris trying to, you know, trying to find these globulars and keep them top of mind. So it's good stuff, Good stuff.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, thanks. That was a fun episode with Peter and, like you said, you know sky and telescope as a bit of an analog. But we also try to kind of emulate cloudy nights in a podcast form. So for any you know astronomers out there, you're probably familiar with cloudy nights to check out gear reviews and observing and you know anything astronomy related. So we have a lot of fun doing it. It's it's great just to talk about astronomy and it's great to bring on different people to also talk about astronomy, so it's a lot of fun.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, you guys do a great job Waiting for the flame wars to start off, so that should be exciting. Next up, we're very lucky to have with us today Dr Jeff Buehler. Jeff who works to understand the movement and habitat patterns of birds, insects and bats by the way of weather surveillance radar systems. Jeff holds a master's of science from Louisiana State University and a PhD in biology from the University of Southern Mississippi. He currently runs his own research lab at the University of Delaware, the Aeroecology Program.
Bill McGeeney:For you at home, you may recall, in a prior month's episode we actually discussed one of the articles that Jeff contributed to, namely that artificial light at night is a top predictor of bird stopover density. Jeff, welcome to Light Pollution News. I know we see each other in one of the dark sky groups here in Pennsylvania. So, yeah, welcome to the show. Thanks, bill, it's great to be here. Finally, I am excited, tia. It's been a while. Oh, you bring an energy to the show. Maybe it's the wit and sarcasm I think that I wish I had. But we have return guest Mr Matthias Schmidt. Matthias, I know you were an eclipse chaser. I know you explained that to us last time you were on the show and this time you went, like clearly one-fourth around the country to find the eclipse. How did this one measure up?
Matthias Schmitt:Bill, thanks for having me again and the esteemed podcast panelists. You guys have an incredible resume and a breadth of skills and whenever I'm on this podcast I learn something new from the other people, so thanks for having me. And usually when I start a stargazing tour, I start with I grew up in Germany, so don't expect this to be entertaining, which is kind of a strange way to say that I have a sense of humor, but not everybody understands it. So, yes, I chased the eclipse from, I guess, texas to Arkansas. This was my fifth eclipse.
Matthias Schmitt:My eclipse spouse, guillermo, from Argentina, came to visit me to observe the eclipse. We met in Argentina, 2019. And we originally with the employees of stargazing company Stargazing Zion. We wanted to observe it in Leakey, texas, because if you go to eclipsophilecom, they have a really good historical overview of the cloud fraction over a 20-year period for a certain spot along the path of totality. So western southwest Texas looked pretty good in this historical overview, but you know the saying that the climate is what you expect and weather is what you get, so I can dive in a little bit more later, but we drove all across Texas and then we ended in Russellville, arkansas, for four minutes and 11 seconds of totality.
Bill McGeeney:Well, you beat us. We had three minutes and 30 seconds, I believe. We flew to Texas. So we initially flew down to Austin, thinking my wife's from Vermont and Vermont has like a 1% chance of clear skies in any given month but this time they were the sweet spot. We contemplated not going down but we figured let's just do it, let's go down and roll the dice. And when we got down there, matthias, we had to. I was constantly looking at that site I forget the name, but probably the one you're talking about and I was refreshing it like hourly, trying to see where the clouds are going to be. And we came up with three different missions and three different plans of attack and then eventually one of them and it shifted. Like every day we was I can't go there now, I can't go there now. And eventually we just lucked out and we're able to find a day pass somewhere and get there. But I, you guys, were driving from like Utah, right.
Matthias Schmitt:Yeah, so I actually calculated the total distance I drove and it's 3,313 miles. Oh, oh, and I want to say that you can always visit amazing places that relate to astronomy or science. We stumbled across Meteor Crater in Arizona. I knew Meteor Crater exists but I didn't know exactly where it was. And there was a sign on the side of the road and it said Meteor Crater 10 minutes. And we said we're going to go there, we want to see this gigantic impact crater. And then, as we continued across New Mexico, we stopped in Magdalena, where the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is the very large array, and spend an hour there. It's just incredible what kind of technological marvels mankind has filled to just elicit the truth and science from our world around us.
Bill McGeeney:Wow, that sounds like a little better of a drive than we have From our world around us. Wow, that sounds like a little better of a drive than we have. We stopped, we passed the Buc-ee's, but that was about the highlight of our drive to and from the eclipse. For those of you who haven't been to Texas, there are these super massive truck stops. They're like their own communities. It's kind of terrifying but cool at the same time. Yeah, Jeff, did you stay here? Did you stay local for the eclipse? Yeah, as I was here in pennsylvania. And was it clouded over?
Jeff Buler:because I know some people were mentioning that it clouded over around here the clouds are going in and out, but but we did get good views when we reached the peak that's good, and it wasn't totality here, but you had you had probably felt the temperature drop right, yeah, you could you could feel the temperature drop and you know it. The light dimmed. If you weren't using glasses, you could still see that it wasn't as bright and shane.
Bill McGeeney:We spoke before you guys were. You guys had good, good weather up there, right, you were able to watch. How much totality did you get? We had 41% coverage.
Shane Ludtke:And for where we live, you know a typical high temperature. That day could have been probably around freezing, but that day it was like plus 10 Celsius, which is like t-shirt weather here.
Bill McGeeney:So we really enjoyed it.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, exactly, exactly. So. It was wonderful, a great excuse to take the day off of work and just do some solar observing. We had a hydrogen alpha telescope and some white light telescopes and you know the glasses, and a few people stopped by and it was just a nice afternoon.
Bill McGeeney:So were the prominences. How were the prominences leading up to, I guess for us, totality? We were able to see a massive prominence right at totality, so I'm assuming you were able to see that.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. So I guess everything's kind of left right reversed in the refractor, but at first the most prominent one was at about 9 pm and it wasn't super pronounced but it was quite large and had some character to it. And then, towards the last half of the eclipse, as the moon traversed across the face of the sun, it exposed the prominence that most people are talking about, which is probably around 7pm, you know, on the clock, and it was a beautiful arch prominence that was very, very pronounced, very colorful and, yeah, we had a blast observing all of that and just a ton of surface detail. Hydrogen alpha is just. There's never a dull moment, you know. It's always different and I can never get enough of it.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, I left my white light filter from my camera at home, thinking you know it's going to be clouded the whole time.
Jeff Buler:but I may do so.
Bill McGeeney:Since we're speaking of eclipses, I'm not sure if any of you have witnessed any strange activity in the skies during the big show. And I know, jeff, we're going to talk about birds in a little bit on that one, but I'll kick things off today with a hot take from the Daily Mail America's UFO hotspots revealed in a new map that shows nearly 100,000 sightings spanning two decades. Is your hometown in the red zone?
Bill McGeeney:Well we just got back from Big Bend and of course they have impeccably brilliant night skies. I say this as an East Coaster, but I think the TSU probably would agree that it's actually legit pretty nice and I'm really sad to report I didn't see any UFOs. But an astute eye will notice that on this map all the UFO activity correlates with dark skies. There's minimum light pollution and no light pollution where UFOs are usually found. So I want to put on my tinfoil hat and indulge in some conspiracy theorists here. Shane, I know you're always looking up. Have you ever seen anything strange or unexplainable up there? Shane, I know you're always looking up.
Shane Ludtke:Have you ever seen anything strange or unexplainable up there? Not once, nope. Maybe strange, but always explainable, matias anything for you, anything up there.
Matthias Schmitt:I just looked at the map Bill, and it does correlate with the darkness of the natural sky.
Bill McGeeney:And do you guys?
Matthias Schmitt:remember that there was this UFO panel in in congress last year. Oh yeah, can't forget that. And yeah, and I usually, when I people ask about ufos all the time, you know, have you ever seen anything strange? And I said I lived in new york city and I one day I saw a man walking with a parrot on his shoulder into the subway. So that's the only strange things I've ever seen in my life. There you go. But I always tell people, I ask them first what percent of landmass is the United States of America? The continental? It's 2%. We get 99% of UFO sightings.
Matthias Schmitt:Why would an alien species that is sophisticated enough to cross the vast interstellar spaces crash, land on the last meter on the United States or just fly over the United States? And as a scientist, I always have to assume that everything initially has a random distribution. With the advent of cellular phones and mobile phones and the recording capability, people just record all sorts of stuff in the sky, whether it's 95% of the time it's Venus, then you have satellites, you have the ISS, you have shooting stars, meteors, you have high altitude weather balloons. So I tried to use Carl Sagan, who said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And there really is no evidence that aliens have ever visited our planet or crash landed here, especially New Mexico.
Bill McGeeney:You don't think they want to go to our deserts especially in New Mexico. You don't think they want to go to our deserts.
Matthias Schmitt:You know you might have seen Dune to the desert planet. I just read yesterday that astronomers were. We always tried to look for locations of habitability and what we have to look for in terms of life, and a lot of plant life actually uses infrared radiation as an energy source. And they suggested maybe we should not just look for a green, something green, but also something purple or violet when we look for plant life elsewhere Interesting.
Bill McGeeney:I thought you were going to tell us that there are some worms out there. I have not seen the second part of Dune yet. I've read most of the books, so I'm looking forward to that. I know I'm behind the curve on that one. Well, speaking of brightness, there's an interesting video on the impact of light pollution on photography.
Bill McGeeney:There's a power duo over at Astro Backyard, including past guest Ashley Northcote, put together a very nice video on the differences between shooting in Bortle 6 and Bortle 3 skies For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. Regarding the Bortle scale, it's generalized approximation of sky brightness, with one being pretty much where Shane lives a high, contrasting Milky Way in paradise and then nine being pretty much where I live, where you get to see three or four stars at night. Astro Backyard used two images of the Horsehead Nebula, including one taken by Northco at the Winter Star Party in Florida. The other was taken at their house under Bortles 6, ontario skies.
Bill McGeeney:In this video, trevor Jones didn't use a filter. However, I think it did a pretty good job explaining how we visually see light pollution above us. So you have one that has more contrast, more detail, and the other one that is. It looks kind of visibly washed out. I don't think anyone's necessarily surprised by that. I know for light pollution. I know some people who are actually out there advocating have kind of trouble connecting to the average homeowner with it. Is this something that will connect or is this something that's still too geeky to show a with and without view of light pollution?
Shane Ludtke:You know, bill, I would probably say it might be a little too nerdy for the average Joe to connect to that, or maybe just to care for the average Joe to connect to that, or maybe just to care. I think that it certainly does a great job to illustrate the impacts of light pollution on the night sky, but I always appreciate it when you were on our show and connecting it to the impacts on the environment around us, whether it's insects or bird life or our health as well. I think that's when it really starts to resonate with other folks. But certainly the photograph experiment gives a very tangible result to show, you know, the impacts in that regard.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, I mean, it's something I have to deal with when I'm doing photography here, right, I'm always having to use filters and filters work to a point, but there is no replacement for being in a dark sky. If you want to take a really good astrophotography image here, you have to use filters and you have to edit it down and you're still missing something. It doesn't have maybe some part of a contrast or it's too noisy. The noise kind of smooths over. You know some piece of whatever you're looking at and it's really hard to do. Galaxies, right, because the blue light, the white light, is so prevalent in urban areas. But since we're talking on the eclipse, I wanted to include a little astronomy segment here.
Bill McGeeney:So before we depart from the Bortles scale, I saw something for the first time at Big Ben, and many of the nights actually many of the nights out there, I ended up on my sleeping bag on a campsite picnic table looking up while my cameras were doing their thing, and I was just relaxing and enjoying the night. And for the first time ever, while gazing up at the constellation Ursa Major, I actually envisioned the bear. I've never seen the bear before. This is the first time I've seen, obviously, the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and I heard that Ursa Major was a bear, but I actually saw the bear, which was really cool. It took whatever Bortle Big Bend is at to see that, but I'm sure you can see in other areas, but it was so prevalent right there in those dark skies. And up and down the Bortle scale you have these bell ringers like the beehive cluster, m44, which was a brilliant fuzz down there. But then when we get up here, once you get into like Bortles 7, it just disappears. It just kind of smooths into the background. The smudge of the Orion Nebula becomes harder to see at Bortles 6 and little bell weathers like that so on. So I came across this nice piece that explains the Bortles scale quite nicely.
Bill McGeeney:If you're interested, why don't you just go over to lightpollutionnewscom and look on this show's notes and you'll see the article in the link section which explains the visual degradation of the different Bortles scales as we get brighter and brighter and brighter in the city. All right, international Dark Sky Week, stretched from April 2nd through April 8th. Here at Light Pollution News we post our annual five-day Instagram takeover of our local friends group, the Friends of the Wissahickon up here in Northwest Philadelphia. So you might have noticed some of the additional photos coming in on the Light Pollution News Instagram feed. Did any of you happen to do anything special for International Dark Sky Week?
Shane Ludtke:I have my telescope out a couple of nights but that's not super special, that's pretty much every week. But you know I try to practice good light etiquette, you know, every day of the year. But yeah, really nothing too special to report, I suppose, on my side.
Jeff Buler:I was going to say every night is dark sky night. At my house we make sure we don't have any extraneous lights on jeff.
Bill McGeeney:How do you guys handle your outdoor, your exterior lighting?
Jeff Buler:oh, I have shielded lights but and I turn them on when I have guests coming to visit, otherwise my lights are out.
Bill McGeeney:I don't have any outdoor lights on usually I'm do you ever have any pushback from neighbors on that?
Jeff Buler:No, I don't, Although unfortunately I live near one of the streetlights in my neighborhood which is an unshielded light. It shines right into my bedroom window, so I get to enjoy the collectivity of my neighborhood streetlights all night long and are you Westchester?
Bill McGeeney:I'm in Westgrove. Westgrove they don't have. They can't get you shielding on that. I'm sure they probably could.
Jeff Buler:I think we might have ordinances, but I don't know that they're enforced.
Bill McGeeney:Matthias, I see you sitting down there just waiting.
Matthias Schmitt:No, it's great to hear you know. Every little activity or event that you put on or when you talk to your neighbors is really helpful. At Cedar Briggs we did our regular night sky program on Saturdays. We'll do it once a week on Saturdays until the summer, when we will do three programs a weekend Friday, saturday, sunday and for the eclipse we did solar observing together with our friends at Southern Utah University at the Cedar City. You know, every time you look at the sky and you engage with people, it's an opportunity to talk about the impact of artificial lights on our environment and on us itself.
Bill McGeeney:Matthias, I got to ask you this because I had Dani Robertson on a few shows back and she's a night sky, dark sky officer over in Wales, and is that kind of the equivalent? Are you kind of like the equivalent of that over in Cedar Breaks?
Matthias Schmitt:The official title is dark skies coordinator and I'm basically responsible for the night sky program, for the astronomy program, because we started doing solar observing with a H-alpha Coronado telescope and leading up to the annular eclipse, october last year and the total solar eclipse this year, and people are blown away by what they see when they look at the sun through an H-alpha.
Matthias Schmitt:They see when they look at the sun through an H alpha, and how often do you really look at something that you see every day that's moving through the sky in an apparent motion, and how well do you understand how the sun works? And when we talk about the sun with people through an H alpha and then we tell them okay, so now here is the sun, our closest star. And then we tell them okay, so now here is the sun, our closest star. When we go stargazing at night, every point of light that you see is a star, like the sun. We also have a few planets, but we want to connect what we see during the day with our closest star, with the stars that we can see at night.
Bill McGeeney:Have you had feedback from people on that? Do they understand it? Do they understand what you're trying to do?
Matthias Schmitt:People are very open-minded and when you use good analogies, people get it.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, yeah, I have to say the eclipse was an amazing educational tool. So where we were at the state park we were at in Texas, I don't think many of the rangers there really had any idea about astronomy. Now the rangers there appear to you know, to Jeff's point, they know their ground-based ecology really well. Right, that's their job. Their job is to make sure that the park and the ecosystem and everything is right, but they didn't really know anything about astronomy. So there's a friends group who is trying to start doing astronomy programs there.
Bill McGeeney:They brought in three telescopes, they brought in a six inch DAW with a white light filter and then they brought in a small, really small it looked like a spotting scope or whatever with a white light filter. And then they had a hydrogen alpha and God bless them, they, they really tried to understand it, but to them it just looked red. They, they had no idea. They didn't know how to focus or use any of the tools. They're really doing their best, but evidently there was no one there to you know like actually show them how to use these things that they gave to them. And I came over and I tried to help them with it, but I didn't want to look like I was, you know, bossing them around, and so I just left them to themselves for a bit.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, it was interesting because the the curiosity I don't think these, these Rangers, otherwise would have had much curiosity in it and they, they really did have a great time and you know it's. It's interesting because you get people, you educate people on simple things and that's what we are discussing all the time on the show and over time it's kind of like a snowball, right Like you pick up another one, pick up another one. And over time it's kind of like a snowball right, like you pick up another one, pick up another one. So, matthias, I definitely respect and I hope the best out there, and I assume Cedar Breaks isn't a heavily visited area, is it?
Matthias Schmitt:Cedar Breaks is an officially national monument. It's at 10,000 feet elevation. We're known for our dark skies. We have a great. We are open throughout the year In the. The winter you can snowshoe and snowmobile through the park and in the summer you can hike and come to all our star parties and astronomy programs and we have a great wild wildflower festival at 10 000 feet. You know, in july it's just blooming. Wow, the flowers that we have on the meadows. Oh, and in the vicinity there are my colleagues at Zion National Park, which is also an international dark sky park. Hype Spring, a national monument, the Great Basin, a national park. So they're here in Utah and vicinity. We just have really dark skies and the parks around here and monuments are doing a really great job. This asset.
Bill McGeeney:That explains it, because the state of Utah everyone else had International Dark Sky Week. State of Utah declared International Dark Sky Month Month. I don't think that will jive anywhere else. I don't have 30 slides to put up on Instagram. For a month I struggled with five, so all right. Other things that went on during international dark sky week, and actually this is the lead up to it. Back on March 23rd in Northern Virginia, fairfax County parks, the park system actually encouraged residents to switch off their exterior lighting for one hour between eight 30 to nine 30 PM. Then, two weeks later, during dark sky week, the Fairfax County Public Library System offered light pollution monitoring kits. These monitoring kits could be borrowed for up to three weeks. Each kit contained a sky quality meter, a red light flashlight and one of my favorite tools for understanding night sky. I haven't seen one of these in ages. I have one, actually a planisphere. Shane, do you have a planisphere, one of these in ages.
Shane Ludtke:I have one, actually a planisphere. Shane, do you have a planisphere? I have a couple of different planispheres one for my latitude here and then one for when I travel around 20 degrees north. They're super handy, you know, just to get quickly acquainted with the night sky, especially when you change latitudes. But you know another thing, and you kind of referenced it earlier. You know, when you get to a real dark sky for the first time, or even if you're experienced there, it can be overwhelming with the amount of stars. You know, bill, you mentioned seeing the bear for the first time. Like the complete bear versus the major.
Bill McGeeney:It was amazing, Shane.
Shane Ludtke:It blew my mind.
Bill McGeeney:I sat there and I had to burn it in.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, for sure, for sure. But it's easy to also get, I find, to get disoriented under a real dark sky because of how much more you see and like stars but also deep sky objects. You know, under a Bortle 1 sky it's not uncommon to see 40 to 50 Messier objects with just your eyes.
Bill McGeeney:you know, no optical aid, which adds to the confusion confusion so having the planisphere is just a super handy tool yeah, I, it's very simplistic, right like you. Just, yes, just, it's like a clock, very simplistic. So fairfax was the only community that tried to build support for a lights out event. Wrangley, maine set its county-wide lights out for two hours, starting from 8 pm on onward on April 6th. Local photographer Kyle Haley even shot the event from the air, what I presume he did by use of a drone.
Bill McGeeney:Getting back to Utah, real fast, matias, utah, the state of Utah believes dark sky tourism will bring in an estimated $5.8 billion. I don't know if that's just dark sky tourism or if that's included in some other aspects of just national parks and whatnot. I don't know if that's just dark side tourism or if that's included in some other aspects of just national parks and whatnot. That's a pretty big amount of money, for it Sounds pretty good to me and I recall going out to Zion the first time I was there. Actually, I remember we did the subway from the top, from dropped in the canyon, came down through the canyon and kind of did like a little a piddly 40 foot rappel down into the subway and that night went out into the Angel River. And I don't know if this is legit or not. Probably isn't. So don't yell at me when I say this. You know I was with this group and you know we had a case of beer and just got in the Angel River and started throwing back some beers and you had the Milky Way right above you. It was a pretty spectacular place Right above you. It was a pretty spectacular place. That was a pretty good memory.
Bill McGeeney:For a first time being in Utah International Dark Sky Week is Dark Sky International's attempt to draw awareness and attention to the issues of light pollution, where obviously volunteers are going out and educating the community. And during this week Dark Sky International actually led the way by conducting a series of educational videos on her YouTube channel, and one of the notable ones came by way of Dr Avalon Owens. Dr Owens looked at how light pollution was affecting insects. It's an interesting video and Dr Owens makes the case that researchers, through diurnal or daytime bias, tended to focus only on daytime animals over nocturnal animals, leading us not at all to register artificial light as a problem for ecologies until very recent. Dr Owens posits that light pollution affects insect timing, navigation and how flowers and landscapes visually appear to nocturnal creatures. And if anyone wants to learn more about Dr Owens' work.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff was kind enough to forward over an excellent article, co-authored by her, on how light drives insect decline, so you can find again. Find that article over at this show's page where we have all the links listed, and also, if you're not on our mailing list. Jeff, you forwarded over a bunch of great stuff. We're actually going to include that on our release mailer that we put out to our mailing list In addition to talking about some of them. It'll be good to actually be able to have it out there if folks want to read it, if anyone wants to see an example of light trap, we came across something in Fredericksburg, texas, on our way out to Big Bend and this was like at five in the morning.
Bill McGeeney:This church was light bathing its walls and it caught I assume it's a moth, I didn't identify it, but it caught all of these moths and it was like a pretty astounding video where it definitely shows you how much light can change and affect the ecology. Right there it looked like a moth beacon, kind of like the bat symbol in the sky. So there was just a horde of moths all attracted around this church, around the light, around the fencing on the street. You had to watch. You didn't step on any of them. They're all laying on the ground and it was astounding, and so definitely we'll have that up on Instagram too, so you'll want to check out that video.
Jeff Buler:Bill, that's like a really common way for entomologists to sample moths is to put out a bed sheet. You know, hang a bed sheet at night and shine a light on it. They call it mothing. They actually keep track of moth migration.
Bill McGeeney:I believe it.
Bill McGeeney:It seems to be very effective. It was astounding, jeff. I mean you had to watch. I felt bad driving on the road. I'd never seen so many moths in my life in that dense of an area.
Bill McGeeney:Well, in line with Dr Owen's arguments, a study out of the Catholic University of Levant in Belgium and Matthias, feel free to slap me on that one. They found that successful urban moths had smaller wings than moths in rural areas, correlating to a weaker response to light traps. Using the study as a trade-off to being able to survive in bright, nightless environments, smaller winged moths were able to cover less ground at a slower rate. And then this month, a study from Ecological Processes looked at a decade of acoustic monitoring data from North Carolina to understand bat activity as it pertains to lunar cycles and light pollution. Their findings identified artificial light at night as being a potential culprit for reduced bat activity, irrespective of the lunar cycle. And a separate study in sustainability looked at the impact from light used in construction of a bolder species who swept in for feeding over more of the light-timid species.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, and Bill, you know I would add that that paper, that review paper by Dr Owens about the impacts of light on insects, is a great read. Light on insects is a great read and one thing that she points out is that artificial light at night is really a very recent change to our planet. Right, like a lot of things that affect wildlife, like climate change and habitat loss and changes, those things have been happening for millennia on our planet. But the day-night cycle starting to be able to respond and react to the that change, that's right now.
Bill McGeeney:It's just, it's just super disruptive because these ecosystems have never been exposed to that right, we're seeing a lot more right, a lot more insect fatalities because they don't have a chance to actually evolve, to adapt to it. Right.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting is a lot of these early papers that have been published because on the impacts to birds at night, a lot of those initial papers showed really strong reactions to birds. So, like out in Minneapolis there was a really large light show. There was a building, it was the brightest building in the country. Large light show. There was a building, it was the brightest building in the country and you know, the first week they had it lit up, it was during migration and there were birds, just you know, colliding with the building and you know, falling, kind of falling out of the sky all around the building and they just saw these really big responses of birds to these lights and I think in the 200 years since, I mean, maybe it's encouraging to know that it seems like the level of response that we get by birds to lights seems a bit more muted.
Jeff Buler:Of course, it could also be that there are fewer birds now than there were 200 years ago, but but I'd like to think that you know the wildlife they're gonna the natural selection is gonna come into play here, right, and that wildlife will adapt, be it, you know, becoming less responsive to lights, or, like you mentioned, this study about the insects in the cities having smaller wings. You know, and I think they also mentioned, that there's possible changes to their eye morphology and you know they could be evolving, essentially to deal with that light pollution in kind of ways we may not have thought about.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, they do mention about the eye morphology in there. I want to get into the birds in a second and I know you have a lot of good stuff to say in there, but just real quick on that. Like we're down, what percentage of birds over the last 100 years?
Jeff Buler:Well, the statistic is since the 1970s we've lost 3 billion birds. We estimate about 30% fewer birds than we had in the 1970s here in North America.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff, can I ask you a real quick question on how you count those birds? My wife is a birder, she's got me into birding and we'll go down to Cape May and we'll sit there and watch these birds fly over and you know like the only thing you can do is count them right. They're not like oh's ralph over there just flew over. There's no identifier. Yeah is. Is there a, a multiplier in effect, on that number, or is that just? Do you guys feel pretty confident that that's pretty much the ballpark number?
Jeff Buler:well, they've quantified bird populations in different ways. So there is a technique where you kind of you know we do these point counts, or you stay, stand in a point and you count the birds you're seeing and, yeah, you can calculate sort of the density of birds in that area and then you could extrapolate that to larger areas. But for this three billion bird lost paper. They actually relied on weather radars to try to quantify sort of what is the total biomass of migratory birds. And again, because these radar systems here in the US you know, our radars at least to the extent that we can see birds, we can see birds over about 25% of the land area and there's just no other method to be able to observe such a large fraction of you know the land area here in the US, and so the weather raters have been really useful in helping us to be able to quantify the biomass of birds at a continental scale.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, and I know you're heavily involved in doing research on that and just tying it back to earlier. So you see any UFOs in that radar.
Jeff Buler:Well, you know they can detect planes and things, but I believe they all get filtered out.
Bill McGeeney:Okay. Like we don't see yeah you don't see, spaceships are filtered out, right?
Jeff Buler:Because they can sort of filter those out, the data. Otherwise, yeah, otherwise that's all you would see, or lots of planes in the sky. But they've actually been used to look at the debris of the space shuttle when it broke apart in the atmosphere. You could see it on the weather radar. Oh wow.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah to see. Weather Sounds pretty grim, rain down, yikes. Well, let's look at one last ecology thing and then we're going to take a quick break and then Jeff will jump into your research here. So in a journal of forests a study found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, that environmental light regulated woody plant circadian rhythms. As it specifically relates to artificial light at night, prior research found that Allen artificial light at night ushered in a bud burst in deciduous trees around 8.9 days earlier in the spring and a delayed color changeover by about six days on average in the fall.
Bill McGeeney:I want to take a quick breather here because I know we'll have a lot to talk about on the bird side. First, I want to thank you at home for taking the time to listen today. I know many of you guys have heard this spiel before, but I do want to emphasize that we are completely listener-funded, which dictates how we use the tools that we have, or how the tools are used to collect news and aggregate it on this show. I'm really not sure if you're aware or not. Over the past few years there's been an increasing trend of the media to kind of wall everything off behind a paywall, which unfortunately does add up on the cost side and Light Pollution is completely, 100% supported by you, the listener. You guys help us cover all of our costs, including production, editing, social media work, aforementioned news collection and, of course, server space.
Bill McGeeney:No-transcript, please. Why not say thank you by becoming a monthly supporter? Only costs $3 per month, same price as a cup of coffee. If you like the show but you don't want to commit $3 per month, why not share the show with those who might be interested? We have TikTok, youtube shorts, instagram reels that are pre-packaged and ready for sharing. If that's not your thing, why not simply provide a rating or review on whatever podcast host?
Bill McGeeney:that you use If you're already a supporter. Thank you so much. You really help us defray some of those costs. I can't thank you enough. For those of you who aren't, I know how easy it is just to ignore these requests, but if you're able to help us here, we very much appreciate it and look forward to continuing to provide great content into your earbuds and beyond Shane. When did the idea for the actual astronomy podcast come about? Like, where did that come from?
Shane Ludtke:It's kind of a two-part story, I guess. So my podcast partner in crime, Chris Beckett, and I did a podcast on astronomy I don't know 12 years ago maybe, Like before the whole podcast infrastructure became what it is today create a podcast and then, you know, put it out there for people to listen to, and the distribution system back then wasn't super strong. So I think we did about 10 episodes and then just said this is kind of crazy. We're spending hours and hours and hours for four people to listen to it. Two of those four people are my parents, so it just didn't really add up for us so fast forward to, I guess, four years ago.
Shane Ludtke:You know, podcasts became a big part of a lot of people's lives, mine included, and I was. I'm kind of a nerd at heart and I wanted to learn just like the back end of podcasts, like how do these things get made, and then turn into something I see on an app on my phone. You know, Chris and I talk astronomy all the time. We go out and observe together, then we go have a beer together and we talk about astronomy. You know, Chris and I talk astronomy all the time. We go out and observe together, Then we go have a beer together and we talk about astronomy. And I approached him and said hey, man, you want to do the podcast thing again? You know it's a little easier. We could talk about astronomy, have a conversational type of podcast, and we'll just keep it as simple as possible.
Shane Ludtke:So that's what we did and when we had that conversation about 10 days later, we were told don't leave your house anymore because there's this big scary flu going around called COVID. And in a way that was kind of fortuitous for the podcast, because now everybody is sitting at home, you know, kind of bored, and a lot of folks were starting to tap into lifelong interests or maybe hobbies that they had left behind. Astronomy was one of those hobbies that a lot of people picked up and the podcast really took off because folks were just stepping into the hobby, probably in numbers that I don't know have ever been seen. Like if you were trying to buy an eyepiece or a telescope during that time, good luck, Cause most it was sold out. That was one of the big supply chains that was also disrupted, but largely disrupted because of the demand, and it was kind of an exciting time for us. But that's really the story behind the podcast and, yeah, we've just sort of let it go and evolved naturally over the last four years.
Bill McGeeney:That's funny. You mentioned COVID. Covid is kind of like the inflection point. 10 years prior to COVID I had done a lot of stargazing, but COVID finally gave me a chance to kind of reset, look at my priorities, and I started going out to because what else are you going to do? I started going out to different dark sky locations and started looking at stars and then kind of rekindling some of the enjoyable nature of that.
Bill McGeeney:But it wasn't just stars. That's when I started reading Paul Bogart's book and then I started getting into some of these, these details and started joining up with dark sky international, started learning more in a. Dark sky international, of course, has such a phenomenal educational set of tools there, including pamphlets and everything right there on our website. But I started learning more about it and that's why coming out of COVID is when I decided, all right, maybe I'll do a leap and start this show. So it's funny that you guys kind of had the same plus or minus, like two years of timing on that. You know, it's still pretty, pretty funny that that's how it happened. Yeah, the pandemic, it definitely. I felt like it refocused you, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely it.
Shane Ludtke:You know it made you think well, you had more opportunity to think, you know, because of the isolation and just how it disrupted everybody's lives. It really put things into perspective. Perspective, yeah, it was an interesting time. And you know, kind of an extension of amateur astronomy, or for a lot of amateur astronomers too, is just public outreach. You know whether you know Matthias you were mentioning the hydrogen alpha scope earlier you know a lot of astronomy clubs.
Shane Ludtke:That's a big focus is, you know, getting out to folks and, you know, try to spread the hobby and that's another thing that Chris and I enjoy a lot. And you know the podcast has just turned into a wonderful mechanism for us to reach a lot more people than we ever could have dreamed, because you know, we put in a couple hours a week to record, but if we were to set up a telescope in a park here in our city for a couple of hours, we get a very small percentage of contact compared to what we do with the podcast. So it's been great that way too, just to promote astronomy and sort of the adjacent sciences and interests, light pollution being another one that we do talk about, I wouldn't say regularly, but somewhat regularly Before yourself, bill. We had Richard Husiak on, who's a big light pollution advocate here in our province, and we've had a couple other conversations on it too over the four years. It's certainly a topic we don't stray too far from. You guys are doing good work All right.
Bill McGeeney:Switching over to more terrestrial objects here, jeff, you included an article on bird activity from 2017 Eclipse using radar analysis and citizen science eBird observations. For those of you who aren't familiar, it says eBird is an application where birders can record what they see, where they see it, when they see it, notifies other birders of what's going on. Can you walk us through these observations? For those of you keeping track at home, this will be under the title Revisiting 2017, part 1 and 2 on the show page. So, jeff, these 2017 articles have a lot of interesting information in them. Included in such was the reduction of flight time during the span of totality, as measured by radar, and the increase of nighttime behaviors. I have this right of vultures roosting.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, and there's been other observations too about, you know, a variety of wildlife and how they react to a total eclipse, and this is work that was done by colleagues of mine at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and so I think these articles are posted on the BirdCast website, so if you're interested in learning about how we use radars to study bird migration.
Jeff Buler:That's a great place to start. So, yeah, it was kind of a unique opportunity for that August 2017 eclipse, because you know the maturity of our ability to use the weather radars, to extract all the biological information out of them and kind of look at how they responded to the eclipse sort of you know, in a more mature state. So so, yeah, it was really interesting because I think you know one of the hypotheses was that when, in the area of totality, that there would be a lot of activity by nocturnally active and you know, yeah, turkey vultures going to roost, other diurnal birds going to roost like swallows and and martins and things and crickets started chirping at night and like that, like it was night. There was even a a study that was showing that spiders were deconstructing their webs during the eclipse.
Jeff Buler:Taking it down, huh yeah, taking it down for the night. And so what they didn't see is that the nocturnally active birds didn't start to take off. So August is a time where we're into the autumn migration and typically, you know, after sunset you would see. See, you know, most of our migrating birds migrate at night and so usually shortly after sunset that's when birds will take off for migration. So it was curious that they they saw the activity of all the diurnally active insects and birds sort of subsided, but then they didn't see this sort of usually what you see around twilight. So well, twilight is this pulse of birds taking off for migration or nocturnally active insects taking flight.
Bill McGeeney:So I'm curious did anyone here see any peculiar bird activity we saw? We had swallows around us that appeared to kind of like tone down and they start going to roost right around totality and then I guess, maybe like about a minute before the end of totality, like they became alive and vibrant again and life was back to normal. I wonder if they realized that. You know, maybe this wasn't nighttime or they had some kind of environmental cue. But, matthias, did you notice anything?
Matthias Schmitt:Yeah, the birds behaved very strangely as totality approached. We were right across a field where there were a bunch of cows that, as it got dark, it looked like they were about to go to sleep. It's just amazing what you can observe when you are still and, on the other hand, as totality approaches, I get really strange feelings and it's just an. It's just an amazing moment when, where a moment ago was just the sliver of the sun's disc, you have the moon covering the sun's disc. You have the moon covering the sun. You see the corona. People are cheering. I get goosebumps just talking about this. And it happened so fast. One of my protege from New York that went with us this was his first eclipse. I want to share this with people that I care about and I took him with us and after it was over, he said it didn't last long enough. Where's the next one? It's in Spain. Okay, I'm going to start saving for this trip.
Bill McGeeney:I mean, let's see if you have four minutes. I had three minutes and 30 seconds. Come on, buddy, you had eternity.
Matthias Schmitt:And even four minutes and 11 seconds go by so fast. It is this it's like for a moment time stands still and then it just accelerates. It's impossible to explain to somebody who has never seen a total eclipse what happens and what people go through individually, and for somebody that has seen one, you don't have to explain it to them. So it's one of these events, these moments in your in in my life, that had such a profound impact on me and my astronomy career. It's it's hard to fathom what our ancestors must have gone through, what they must have thought when, all of a sudden, the source of light and energy just disappeared. There is this folklore story about the Chinese people that used to come out with pots and pans and started to pound them for the moon to go away. And of course it happened, and they still still do this to this day, which, you know, explains correlation is not causation.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff, did they recreate the study for this year? Were they doing research with?
Jeff Buler:Yes, this year they had the birdcast website and actually has a live radar feed where they show you, they filter out all the meteorology and they show you all the biology in the radar so you can see, like, what the birds are doing right at you know in real time. And I think they probably will be doing a similar analysis after this act of what happened and to fact, on the evening of april 8th, at least in my area, that that was the biggest night of migration, the night after the eclipse so far this spring. So, and they also noticed that in the august 2017, that that that evening, you know, after the sun actually set, they had a larger pulse of migration than they had on the surrounding days. Oh, wow. So I don't know if there's anything there there, but that's kind of an interesting observation.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, the other thing that I think they were able to show was that the birds and insects started responding when the obscuration of the sun reached like 30%, so at a level that where humans can't really perceive much of a change in the light levels, the birds and insects were starting to respond. So that was like an hour before.
Bill McGeeney:That's the radar that was explaining that and that was based on the radar?
Jeff Buler:Wow, yeah, because that's the radar that was explaining that and that was based on the radar. Wow, observations yeah, because that's the one nice thing about the radar is it gives you a broad scale perspective that you can't otherwise see. Right like people on the ground. Yeah, we can see what's happening in our immediate vicinity, but we can't really see that larger landscape view of what's happening right, especially up the sky and jeff to your.
Bill McGeeney:I mean it's really hard for me. Who's sitting there trying to take in the eclipse? I'm there to enjoy the eclipse. It's kind of like entertainment, right to me. It's an experience, it's something unique and experiential. But you're not studying the animals, right? You're kind of passively paying attention to everything around you, but you're not so, right, you're kind of passively paying attention to everything around you, but you're not so to me.
Bill McGeeney:I asked, I asked Caitlin this. I was like hey, the vultures. There's a whole bunch of vultures on the tree near us. I was like, did they go to roost once we hit totality? And she was like no, they're just kind of flying around like they usually did. I was like, oh, I thought they went to roost.
Bill McGeeney:So there's a part you know where I can bias myself, because I'm not writing this stuff down, I'm not tracking as much. I'm there looking at the sun the whole time watching that. But I can definitely tell you that those barn swallows, they acted weird and they acted weird towards totality. Once we got to totality, two minutes in they started becoming normal behavior again and I wonder if part of that is because there was lights on the facility where they roost and those lights, you know they they come on automatically after sundown. So those lights came on. I wonder if they're kind of conditioned to behave a certain way because of the light being that close to lights. Normally that maybe it's, you know there. There's some activity there that they do normally before these lights come on yeah, I don't know.
Jeff Buler:I mean, you know, the other thing that is interesting is that I mean one reason why it might be that nocturnally active animals didn't really start doing their thing is that, you know, when the sun dips below the horizon, there's changes in the polarized light and there are these other sort of things that happen in the sky right that might signal to the animals that it's really nighttime, and so I think things just got a lot of were very confused, because it's not like a really thick, you know, a cloud passing by can cast a shadow similarly thick. You know, a cloud passing by can cast a shadow similarly. But yeah, I don't know, I don't know what it is, why the eclipse triggers these, these behaviors, because for me it was sort of unsettling to notice the dimming of the sky. Right, it just felt weird to see that.
Bill McGeeney:Did you notice anything in your area to notice any activity?
Jeff Buler:no, I was trying to pay attention to what was going on from the birds and the insects, but I didn't really notice anything around me, although I was watching the radar data coming in and you could see that the amount of activity of animals in the air was subsiding slightly, you know, as peak totality.
Bill McGeeney:That's so cool, so I guess you don't do a knock, knock, mig, you have your own. You use radar instead of putting a microphone out there. I tried to. I'm still trying to understand it. Well, on the migration point you mentioned before and I told Betty Maya this last time that I was lucky enough to hear migration when I was up Cherry Springs last and that was one of the neatest things I've ever encountered stargazing in my life.
Bill McGeeney:And I didn't know what it was until the next morning when I saw a continuation of that migration.
Bill McGeeney:Very very cool, very cool. So, since we're on migration, as many of you know, and Jeff has said it, we're in the midst of spring bird migration here. As many of you know, and Jeff has said it, we're in the midst of spring bird migration here. Audubon put out an overview of the many things various chapters around the United States are doing to promote safe passage for birds and Shane I'm sorry it's kind of a US heavy show, I apologize Including Audubon's also working with businesses and governments to pass bird safe window practices and institute lights out programs. Jeff, you forward forward over five articles discussing birds and their fatal attraction to artificial light. Are you able to walk us through some of this research? I know last year we had the horrible impact in chicago, right there at the waterfront.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, actually one of the papers was a study that was done at that McCormick place right there on the lake I had mentioned earlier. You know, our sort of the maturity of what we call radar aeroecology, right, where we use weather radars to look at animals in the air. We consider the air habitat just like any terrestrial or aquatic habitats and it's a really great tool for us to be able to look at that. But it hasn't been until, you know, in the last 20 years that we've really we've had a renaissance in the use of radar to be able to study flying animals, and when I was doing my dissertation research, we were trying to develop methods to use the radars to quantify where birds stop when during migration, right. So most of these birds they migrate at night and they'll fly through the night, but they won't make their whole journey in one night and so they stop along the way and we can use the radar to look at where these birds are taking off, right at the end of civil twilight, when they all take off in very well-synchronized flights to map where they were on the ground. And one of the first large-scale studies where we did this, one of the patterns that we noticed is that we had In areas where there was not a lot of urban development, which is most of you know this was in the northeastern US our urban footprint isn't quite that large like, truly like very high density urban areas right, it's maybe 6% of the land surface.
Jeff Buler:And so in the areas where there isn't a whole lot of urban development, birds were avoiding urban land cover. But in the very high urban cover areas, like the major cities like Boston, baltimore, philadelphia and New York, there was a positive association with birds and urban areas. So this first study where we tried mapping where these birds are stopping over at these very large kind of regional scale get it this first time to get this really broad scale perspective we can immediately see kind of like these associations with urban areas. And that got us thinking about light pollution being acting as like an attractant to urban areas and so, yeah, we did some follow-up research and to look more explicitly at this and measuring light pollution levels and found that, yeah, there's a really strong relationship between bird density and proximity to these really bright, light polluted areas.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff, what is it about the lights that attracts them? It's not just as simple as like for those of you who aren't from the US and don't know the geography. A lot of them are falling. What we were talking about here is like the Atlantic flyway, right Sure.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, a lot of these birds are migrating north and south along the Atlantic coast coast, which is where we have a lot of major cities, right so how do you discern the fact that the cities are placed in their path, versus them wanting to go to the cities?
Jeff Buler:we can control for a lot of these other factors that affect their distributions. Like, a lot of these birds are forest dwellingdwelling birds you know that are the boreal forests of Canada, produce a lot of land birds here in North America and so they're, you know, forest birds. So they're looking for forest habitat. Yeah, they do concentrate along the coast, but we can control for the proximity to the coast, the amount of urban development and other factors that can affect where these birds are distributed, so that we can tease apart, you know, is it the urban development or is it really the light or is it that they're concentrating near the coastline? So, after we control for all those things, yeah, we're seeing these relationships with proximity to bright areas, where the density of birds really increases as you get closer to these bright areas. I glow, we think it's the sky glow, oh, okay.
Bill McGeeney:So I'm responding to. What is it about? The sky glow, Because I kind of I understand the research on moths. Now, right Is that they use it for navigation on their back and that's how they get trapped, not realizing that the light isn't the moon or whatever that light's changing the way that they fly. What's so special about SkyGlow? Why does that affect?
Jeff Buler:them, the birds. They have several different navigation systems, but all of them really come down to what they can see through their eyes. So they have, you know, they can see the visible spectrum with their eyes. They can see the stars. They do navigate by the stars. By the main, they also navigate by polarized light, so they can see light polarization. They also navigate by the magnetic field and they actually have sensors in they can sense the magnetic field through their eyes, and so we think maybe the glare of the lights might be disrupting their ability to see all these different cues in it. It's just disorienting in some way, and so they have a similar behavior, like insects, where they have this flight to light and they can literally get trapped in a light beam. So one of the studies that I had shared is the study that was done looking at birds reacting to the tribute and light memorial in in downtown right manhattan yeah, yeah right on september 11th, which is at the peak of auto migration every year matthias knows that one pretty well
Jeff Buler:yeah, and they have. There's some great video of just these birds, thousands of birds, circling in the light beams, and so it's a similar phenomenon, like insects just circling in your backyard floodlight. The birds are doing the same thing, but to be honest, we don't really know why. The mechanism is really other than they are being drawn to cities at a very large scale, and we did. We did some back of the napkin calculations to see. You know how far these birds can see to the horizon to be able to see sky glow of big cities, and you know they fly at about on average about 500 meters above the ground and that height they can see 300 kilometers to the horizon, like in the eastern US. There is really no place where they can't see some large city on the horizon, even though this attraction to the sky glow is happening over hundreds of kilometers of distance. So you could have birds that are in the boreal forests of Canada and they're going to see these major cities in Canada. I'm sure they can see.
Jeff Buler:Montreal from 300 kilometers away, or even further if they're flying higher up Right. It could still be in a pristine sort of you know forested area, but be able to see the city on the horizon I wonder if it's their way of adapting.
Bill McGeeney:Is it safer? Is that?
Jeff Buler:in a bright area for them. I don't, I don't know. There have been some hypotheses sort of promoted that well, you know, historically if there was light at night on the ground it would be like fire. You know, certainly you can have wildfires and things that are happening, and so maybe that was some kind of you know there was some kind of benefit to flying towards areas where there was wildfire. I don't know, flying towards areas where there was wildfire, I don't know. But but what's interesting is that the birds that get trapped in the tribute and light memorial they have observers on the ground such that when there get to be a certain number of birds sort of circling around the beans, they'll turn them off.
Jeff Buler:And as soon as they turn them off, the birds kind of resume their migration they just, they just keep going you know, they disperse from the area and they'll turn the lights back on and it generally they'll sort of start aggregating again in the beam and they do this several times in the night and we can see that on the radar the birds aggregating in the beam and then dispersing as soon as the lights go off it's a it's amazing to be some kind of yeah, I don't know that maybe the glare of the lights is is really disorienting them and they just can't. They don't know where to go and they just circle around.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff, thank you so much. It's it's really amazing to to think of and we just had a massive ecology segment on this show. I don't think I've had this long of an ecology segment. That's not to say we. I cover a lot of ecology and ecology in my mind is is one of the easiest ways to understand actually what light pollution does and adjust it and it really makes light pollution the pollution, part of light pollution, and it just astounds me at how much is affected by light at night. It shouldn't astound me, because I do all my stuff during the daytime and if someone came along and blotted out the sun and I'd be heavily affected by that, you know, during the daytime and it's it's kind of. It's kind of something I think a lot of people just never think about. Is this, this ecology piece, and and I know the Audubon.
Jeff Buler:When you're driving down the street and the person coming the other way has their high beams on and the glare of the light, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. See where you're going, we'll get to that.
Bill McGeeney:We have one in there on that. But yeah, that's that's. It's something, matthias, I see you itching there. Do you have anything to chime in on?
Matthias Schmitt:No, jeff, thank you so much for your insight is, I think, amazing, and it also speaks to how hard it is for people to understand the impact that light pollution has on our ecosphere and biosphere. And humans, I think, are really poor at understanding the probability and the impact that small changes have on a large and grand scale. Right, we talk, we can talk about light pollution for decades and people say you know what's three billion birds? Right, I just try to look up how many birds there are in total. I read a number that says it's hard to pin down 50 billion as one number.
Matthias Schmitt:But if you assume, right, you know we have 3 billion birds that I don't know what the time was that you mentioned earlier, jeff, but it's these incremental effects that incremental changes have on our ecosphere and they are so hard to turn back and rewind. Right, it's like when you're sitting in a movie theater and there's a great movie on and you're going outside and you tell people on the street this is a great movie, you should come inside and watch it, and people you know some people come inside. Probably, if you're in the movie theater and you start to say fire, everybody is dispersing and running out. So the amount of conviction that people like Jeff have to do and you, bill and Shane, talking about light pollution and how you engage with your audience is a monumental undertaking.
Bill McGeeney:Right, and we don't want to be the people screaming fire, right, you don't want to be the person saying, hey, I mean, I don't know, we might not be at that level yet, but for insects maybe we are. I don't know. I'm always astounded at the impacts that light has and it's so hard to convey. People appreciate hearing the impact that light has on the ecosystem animals, insects, everything but they don't like hearing the fact that they have to change something. And that's where it all falls apart.
Bill McGeeney:And I can tell you exactly on my Instagram counts where the numbers fell off, and it was on the tips for what people can do which came to one fourth of the likes that the other ones had. People don't they don't internalize, I guess, any of this stuff, jeff. And and this is something that you, you guys in the avian field, have been talking about for over a hundred years I know the fellow over here at the discovery center was telling me that Audubon's had documentation on birds and light collisions since the early 1900s, the early 1800s. Oh, wow, even earlier, the early 1800s.
Jeff Buler:Wow, yeah, like the mid-late 1800s, yeah, yeah. And as soon as you know we started manufacturing electric lights at scale and putting them out. You know that's when a lot of sort of the modern era of light pollution was happening, be stories of on foggy nights during the bird migration season, that migratory birds would basically fall out of the sky around these lighthouses because they would be attracted to the light of the lighthouse or a safe place to land when they were sort of experiencing poor weather and foggy conditions and visibility was really poor. So we know there are things that will enhance sort of that attraction. So when the birds are flying under faulty conditions, that's often when you get bird strikes at communication towers right that are lit up with various….
Bill McGeeney:Comcast towers that are lit up yeah.
Jeff Buler:That's when they would have big collision events. Yeah, that's when they would have big collision events. Yeah, lighting on communication towers because of how, in a way, to make them less attractive to the birds. So there were a bunch of studies done, like in the 1990s, to look at red strobing lights and white strobing lights and constant lights and and yeah, the faAA actually changed their, the way they operate the lighting on communication towers too.
Bill McGeeney:Jeff, I want to ask you on that, because we have a story here from Mid-American Energy out in Iowa started installing radar systems that bring on red lights that sit atop windmills for the safety of pilots as they fly over the area. This isn't the first time we've seen this. Let's see us out in parts of Germany. I believe Germany actually debuted this technology and we have parts of Eastern Washington who are should be already using. I know we had stories on that in the past. Is there a certain type? Do they? Do birds react to red light?
Jeff Buler:They will, but they're not, as they're not as attracted to it as white light, and that's true of a lot of other animals, right, like insects too, are a lot more sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum and so, yeah, the red end of the spectrum. They're less responsive to red light.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, because I was thinking we're always trying to do these coastal windmills which would have, you know, blinking red unless we installed these radar systems. Would that actually attract birds out? Would birds actually be attracted out to those windmills?
Jeff Buler:Well, yeah, as a scientist, the common answer is always it depends right, oh hey, you know, you're a scientist.
Shane Ludtke:I get it.
Jeff Buler:Provides some context. But yeah, yeah, it sort of depends. Right, like the, the red blinking lights has been shown to sort of be the least attractive kind of lighting scenario, but it doesn't mean there's zero attraction. So, yeah, well, if they're, you know, foggy conditions, foggy conditions and birds are seeing a red blinking light, they might respond to it by flying near it. But it'll be, you know, yeah, they'll be less attracted to that than they would a steady light, or red or white lights.
Bill McGeeney:So yeah, or a building that has, like an LED led screen, which, like a lot of these new buildings are these days and when.
Jeff Buler:That's one reason we're really concerned about the transition to led lighting. That's again another sort of change in how we light the night and unfortunately that broader spectrum light is that blue light. That is often right that these LEDs have a lot more intensity in the blue end of the spectrum, which is more attractive to insects and birds and other animals fish.
Bill McGeeney:And you have a lot of buildings that actually incorporate specific colored leds or random colored leds into them. We have here the the cirrus center, both buildings. They look like pretty much video games. You know, you fly in and it looks like something is like changing color all the time and doing all these things. Look at that and I wonder what that does. Now, maybe because it's changing, it's not having as much of an impact. Who knows? I am not a scientist.
Jeff Buler:I do not have any backing on this, so but let's move on we need to learn about, about light spectra and intensity and, and you know, glare, like sky glow and impacts of sky glow per se, but it is something that's getting a lot more attention, which is is great because we're starting to put these pieces together right.
Jeff Buler:We know, in areas you know, there are estimates that in the us we lose upwards of a billion birds to collision with with glass on buildings. We're losing almost twice that to cat predation, and so that's what we're really worried about Cats, cats, oh yeah, what are cats doing? Oh, they're eating lots of wildlife, but that's what we're worried about is, by drawing all these birds into these human-dominated landscapes, that we're exposing them to all these risks of mortality, and that was shown in that McCormick Place study. It was a really nice study because they were looking at bird collisions over a 20-year period and they were able to relate the amount of lights that they had on in the building to how many collisions were happening and controlling for using radar data, like how many birds were migrating that night, and controlling for using radar data, like how many birds are migrating that night, and they were able to show that reducing the amount of lit area of just that building by 50% could reduce collisions like tenfold.
Bill McGeeney:And that building has a long history of bird deaths. It goes back to the 70s, I believe.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, and I think it was right around. 2000 is when they stopped just leaving the lights on all night long. They actually started to move more often.
Bill McGeeney:How many birds did it take to die for them to do that? No sarcasm there, no sadness.
Jeff Buler:To their credit, they are really trying to reduce the mortality. We know there is a direct correlation between the amount of light that you have on a building and how many bird collisions there will be.
Bill McGeeney:Especially one that's right on the edge of a giant lake.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, and they were even able to show like when the winds were coming out of the east from, you know, blowing birds off the lake towards the building. They would get even more collisions. Even the wind direction would matter.
Bill McGeeney:I want to move on away from birds. I appreciate the healthy conversation we just had on it. It was very enlightening, jeff, and thank you. But let's move on to where you're talking glare. It's one topic that we honestly don't cover that much on the show, because there's not many articles that talk about glare, and I found that glare isn't something that people intuitively actually notice. They don't intuitively understand it. It's as if you need to kind of show it to people. You have to kind of teach people what glare is, for them to recognize it and then they see it. But it's not something that is pre-programmed into us. Evidently I always felt or thought it was, but it doesn't seem to be that way, and this comes from the Wall Street Journal.
Bill McGeeney:Catherine Binley writes about LED headlights. Jeff, and you just mentioned, there was an article about a year ago that argued for warm colored fog lamps, seeing that longer wavelength lights cut through fog much better. But for the time being we're stuck in these super bright, super white shortwave lights, and headlights are often so bright that they don't create contrast. Rather, they oversaturate the road area, akin to light bathing of a building. It's difficult sometimes to identify the detail or a color without that contrast and add a bonus here.
Bill McGeeney:One of the things that I gripe personally about over the past few years is an uptick in the super bright bike lights and the abject loss of cycling etiquette when using such lights. It used to be time when you would if you're a commuter cyclist, you would tone down the light or aim at a different direction from oncoming bikers or joggers, but nowadays everyone blares everything right at each other. There's no etiquette at all, and this this time wasn't like 20 years ago. This time was pre COVID, and now we have new technology, newer lights. Can someone help me out here? Why is it? Why are we so comfortable with glare? Why do we accept it? Everywhere I go these days, everything has glare. The gas station has glare, the shops, everything has glare, and it seems like that's how we need light. Does anyone have any?
Shane Ludtke:thoughts on that. Again, no scientist here either, but I think that when I'm within an urban center, nighttime just doesn't exist anymore and it's completely lost in most cases and and I think that people humans anyway have really become accustomed to that and and all like it's, it's. It's like you have a callus built up and it just doesn't register. So I don't know that's my two cents on why a lot of people.
Bill McGeeney:it you kind of get sunspots right when you're driving. You get sun, you're always getting inundated and you're like all right, well, I need to move. If I move, if I look over here, I can see something. Because I can't look directly at it anymore because I lost vision there for a few seconds.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, and you mentioned it too, bill. You know the lighting technology whether it's a flashlight, a bike light, a car light has gotten exponentially more brighter but also more available. You can buy ridiculously bright flashlights for $10 or bike lights that are so much brighter than they used to be because of battery technology and everything, and it's really quite out of control. And it's just, it's really quite out of control. And you know the where I live it's. We have, you know, a number of cities, but there's also a lot of wide open places, so when you're driving on the highway outside of a city it's even more stark, like it really. You know, at times you almost wish you had sunglasses on while you're driving at night to try to shield some of this.
Bill McGeeney:Do you do any of you guys do this? When I'm driving through town Some of the streetlights are so bright I actually use a sun visor. I keep it up, otherwise it actually kind of gives me a headache. You know, like my eyes were not meant to be blasted with bright light at 1030 at night.
Matthias Schmitt:I think it's also from the LED technology that had an incredible jump in the available technology and the cost efficiency of especially dual LED lights.
Matthias Schmitt:Oh yeah, and 15 years ago. Somebody might correct me. So it's a combination of the availability of cheap technology and I think the misconception that we think more light is better and we like to. You know, when you talk about glare and driving at night, the glare from oncoming cars, especially in newer models, is incredible. It is way too bright. It produces a glare when you drive through smaller towns, bright lights everywhere. We think as a culture and that's something societal more light is better, which is just a misconception. More light is just not better.
Bill McGeeney:And glare can be dangerous and I know dark sky advocates will like to use certain images, but there's one that I see every day. It's a Catholic convent. They put in new lights down right at the eye level and they're beyond bright. And there's two of them and I feel bad for these ladies coming in because if you ever wanted to attack them, that's the time, because no one can see like they're so bright that it overpowers the area so much and it no one thinks about that. The thought of glare isn't something that appears to be intuitive or appears to be natural for people I know in europe.
Jeff Buler:I think the European vehicles have a technology that adjusts the high beams to reduce glare to oncoming traffic.
Bill McGeeney:And we have that technology too, jeff. The car we drove around Texas had the automatic brighteners, so it would automatically dim it, but I think they have in Europe.
Jeff Buler:they have additional features where the beam of the light is actually shaded to prevent glare, so it'll dim, but then it'll also change where it's throwing light. So that it won't be in the view of the drivers coming the other way. It's probably German, they're trying to adopt some of that technology here in the us. They want to.
Bill McGeeney:They want car manufacturers to adopt that same technology yeah, and I think car manufacturers have been listening on that. I know car manufacturers have been doing a lot of rejiggling the design of the lights, trying to really kind of find a way to make it work and make it safe for people driving, which to, to their credit, that's great, and I know I've come across a number of articles saying, you know, car manufacturers are looking at this. But overall, in a society view, matthias, what you're saying, I think it's like we don't register glare and this is the source of a lot of the issues. If you're out there trying to talk to, to communicate the issues of light pollution to people, they don't get the glare part. They have to experience it by someone teaching them what it is for them to understand. They're fine with their neighbor blasting inside their house typically. Well, people who come up to us probably aren't fine with that, but normal people who haven't thought of that yet are probably fine with people blasting inside their house. When they get out maybe they can't see specifically where the step is or whatever. They're fine with that because they think that's what it is, what it should be, right. There's no connection to that. You can actually have, you know, a shield of light, jeff, like your place and be able to see stuff you didn't see. And personally, when I'm when I'm biking, I like low light because it gives me more domain awareness. I still have some residual night vision. It's not full, but I have some ability to see everything. When you put in a bright light, you lose everything else blacks out and you don't have that domain awareness anymore.
Bill McGeeney:So we have a health article here from Environmental Pollution and Oxidative Stress, and it looked at how blue light affects the human body, essentially summing up that something that many of us already knew, in that excessive exposure to blue light may create oxidative stresses in our retinal photoreceptor cells that can be from solar or artificial sources, which in turn suppress melatonin secretions. I included this one not because I'm telling you something new or some new research, but because the article itself has a very good lit review of prior studies on the topic. So if you're interested, I'd highly recommend fully reading through it. Please swing over to this page on our website. You know again, the link will be in there. There's a study from the American Heart Association individuals who regularly subjected to bright artificial light at night may be at greater risk for developing strokes. From a study including 28,302 individuals, it was found that the people with the highest levels of outdoor light at night exposure had a 43% greater risk for developing strokes. Similar fates correlated with individuals who had the highest exposure to particulate matter, vehicle emissions, dust, smoke, etc.
Bill McGeeney:Some policy momentum this month From Scenic America, new Jersey and Illinois proposed outdoor lighting regulations and leave out digital billboards. And leave out digital billboards. In New Jersey, sb 2328, and in Illinois, sb 2763,. Both attempted to kick off common sense lighting rules statewide. These aren't the only bills out there, but this month I heard from our prior guest, tim Brothers up in Massachusetts, who expressed optimism about the dual bills moving through that state government.
Bill McGeeney:Some things to note about the New Jersey and Illinois bill. So the New Jersey bill only affects new or replacement state-owned fixtures from the date of the bill onward. Fixtures must fit guidelines within the bill, including mandatory timers for lighting over 1800 lumens. And it appears that Illinois is attempting to do what California governor Gavin Newsom twice put the kibosh on, namely put a robust and well-compiled piece of legislation. Required any light that receives state funding to be fully shielded at a max angle of 60 degrees. Minimize a light trespass by use of shades or exterior fixture angling to be less than or equal to 2700 in color, to only exceeding 2200 in residential and environmental areas. Exterior facades and flagpole lighting must be facing downward of a low intensity, and vanity lights such as the previous should be dimmed or turned off between 11 to 6 am.
Bill McGeeney:So, regardless of legislation, scenic America's gripe was with advertising. Well, the lack of either bill to speak to advertisements such as LED billboards. I realize there's no lawyers on this panel and I am interested in an off-the-cup, reactionist type of legislation. For New Jersey specifically, it comes across as a very weak piece of legislation, my mind. Is there value to getting a foot in that legislative door? Is there any value to that?
Jeff Buler:Yes, for sure. I mean. I think any, any type of movement that is moving towards reducing light pollution is going to be useful, cause again, it's kind of like people's behavior. You know, a drastic change might be met with more resistance and sort of these small incremental things where, okay, it's just state buildings and I feel like those. Those are the ways to then that will eventually lead to legislation with more bite to it. Right, once something gets passed and it's sort of been the law of the land for some amount of time, then we can expand those things.
Bill McGeeney:What do you think the big fear is with these types of pieces of legislation? Why is it that one state you can have people put together a pretty detailed and thorough bill, and other states you kind of have to walk loosey-goosey to present it? We're not talking about gun legislation here. We're not talking about a topic that seems to be very polarizing. What is it about that?
Shane Ludtke:I think with some of the municipalities around here it's twofold it's a public perception of safety or the loss of safety with the loss of lighting or reduced lighting, and then the other is a perceived expense that individuals or businesses would have to incur to retrofit or replace existing lighting. And I just think that at least you know around here not all political decisions, but certainly some, are made to keep your job and not to do necessarily the right thing for you know the environment.
Bill McGeeney:We're talking politics, shane, yeah yeah, yeah.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, it's a frustrating thing, but I completely agree with Jeff. I think that, while this might not be the strongest language, you know that folks would desire. It's a great start, you know, and it'll hopefully lead to an evolution. You know, public policy is worse than trying to turn the Titanic. It just takes a long time and you got to start somewhere.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, I think you hit on this nerve there. People are afraid you're going to take away the lights, but you're not really taking away the lights. You're engineering the use of them in a smarter way, right? Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you're able to convey that? I?
Shane Ludtke:haven't been very successful in that regard, to be candid. I've had the conversations with some, with some folks, and you know they listened to me, but I'm not sure it's resulted in any meaningful change. So yeah, maybe, maybe I need a new script or something like that.
Bill McGeeney:Well, I mean, for a long time light pollution was the just kind of like the pet irritant of astronomers. But, as Jeff's pointed out, it has some serious ecological impacts and that's obviously due to ecological impacts, like we are impacted too, but I think our impact is a little different since we live in enclosed caves. Right, we can close ourselves off from the rest of the world. But, yeah, and here in Pennsylvania, to be fair, we have HB 1803 that is trying to work its way through and it's not the most you know grippy piece of legislation. But, jeff, like you said, you know, maybe it is better to have something get through and we work with it from there and we see what people like and what people don't like and see how we can cater and better present a more responsible ordinance in the future and better present a more responsible ordinance in the future.
Jeff Buler:Yeah, once you change the precedent you set a precedent of some kind of light regulation then it's not as foreign to people to expect that those things happen. Right that we need to be thinking about how we use light in a more effective and efficient way.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, and maybe it has to do with, you know, the fact that some people aren't involved in the conversation. I know Betty Maya had made that point last month. That's a source of a lot of the city's problems when cities try and institute one size fits all lighting things going on at local levels. Take, for instance, the aforementioned Wrangley Lakes Heritage Trust in Maine. They offered home lighting inventories to showcase dark sky compliant fixtures in an attempt to become a dark sky community. Linda Dexter referenced in the article. She mentioned that there were several attractive designs and the pricing is the same as non-compliant lighting, further stating that most manufacturers actually have dark sky fixtures. And in Truckee, california, the town launched a $50,000 rebate program to encourage folks to swap out old lighting fixtures for responsible ones. Their target is specifically commercial and residential buildings and a rebate purports to cover 100% of the outdoor lighting equipment to be purchased. It's backed by the Climate Transformation Alliance, a regional organization that is attempting to obtain carbon neutrality by 2045.
Bill McGeeney:Let's take our last break here. We have some really fun ones coming up to close out the show, so stay with us. This will be a real quick piece of my end and I'll get back to the flow of the show. Real quick piece of my end, and I'll get back to the flow of the show as a reminder to you at home. You can find all the details regarding today's show, or any show, links, narratives and more over at the website lightpollutionnewscom. And be sure to follow us on Instagram, at lightpollutionnews, linkedin, at lightpollutionnews, youtube, at lightpollutionnews, facebook, tiktok, you name it. We're there.
Bill McGeeney:If you haven't already subscribed to listening to the show, be sure to do that right now. Simply hit the subscribe button on whatever podcast you're listening to right now Costs nothing, and you'll receive the show in a monthly feed every time we release a new one. We have a handful of useful articles left. Before I get there. I want to give you guys a chance to plug yourselves. So, jeff, you have any interesting work come down the horizon. Is there anything going to be done on the 2024 eclipse here?
Jeff Buler:Yeah, I think my colleagues are already probably crunching the data on that. So, yeah, for sure they're interested in trying to see how that compares to the 2017 eclipse. We do have an ongoing project where we're looking at how light pollution along the Texas-Mexico border wall is impacting migratory birds. So, yeah, we continue to look at light pollution impacts on bird migration. You know it's not all negative impacts, I think.
Jeff Buler:So there are a lot of birds that are drawn to light pollution, but we're starting to get some evidence that there are some species that are avoiding light pollution, like there's a species called the whippoorwill. It's actually a species that migrates at night, but it's also nocturnally active. It feeds at night, so it's a truly nocturnal species, and there's evidence that when they migrate, they're seeking out these dark skies to travel through dark sky corridors, and we actually see response to artificial light seems to be not as strong in the spring compared to the fall, when we have a lot of all these new young birds that were born in the summer that might be more naive about light. It all might also signal that there's some, like I said, some evolutionary pressure for birds to avoid brightly lit areas, and so we're trying to see to what extent birds might be adapting to to light pollution and what's the?
Bill McGeeney:what's the name of the lab, again, and where can people find it?
Jeff Buler:So we're the Aeroecology Program, we're at the University of Delaware. I can give you the link to our website and then, if you want to know more about how we use radars to look at bird migration and study impacts of light pollution on birds, you can go to the BirdCast website and in fact they put out forecasts for bird migration and they also forecast where bird migration is going to be the heaviest, as sort of like a lights-out campaign. So they'll flag certain areas to notify them that migration is going to be heavy and to turn their lights out.
Bill McGeeney:It's a really cool view they have. You go there and you get to see these dark purple and dark blue and red areas that light up as they move through the US. Yeah, and Whippoorwills, they seek out dark sky, but are they light-avoidant normally?
Jeff Buler:Well, yeah, they're nocturnally active.
Bill McGeeney:Okay.
Jeff Buler:So they sleep all day. Basically they come out at dusk to feed on insects, but yeah, they're really only active at night.
Bill McGeeney:I remember as a kid hearing that, but after that I really never heard them again. And you know, it doesn't really get dark here. It may get a little dim, but it doesn't really get dark here. It may get a little dim, but it doesn't get dark. And then I hear him upstate. So I was just curious on that. Yeah, matthias, now that you're off, the eclipse is his past and you're taking your little siesta here until the very next eclipse and flying out to western spain. Where can people learn more about what you do about? I want to say cedar Breaks. That's not it. Yeah, cedar Breaks, cedar Breaks. Okay, where can people learn more about Cedar Breaks National Monument? Cedar Breaks National Monument.
Matthias Schmitt:Yeah, we have Night Sky programs every weekend on Saturdays and after Memorial Day we'll start to have regular programs on the weekends Friday, saturday, sunday. So you can always go to our website and find out what programming we offer and our Facebook page and Instagram Cedar Breaks and for National Monument you can find the latest information about the programming that we do.
Bill McGeeney:Excellent, one of these days I'll get out there. You're going to put on a good show all right, I'll do it Absolutely. All right, Shane. Where can people find more about the Actual Astronomy podcast?
Shane Ludtke:You can check out our website, actualastronomycom, or find us on any podcasting software. We do two episodes a week. Mondays and Thursdays is when they drop, and what makes us a little unique is our podcast is almost 100% about visual astronomy. You know there's lots of really good podcasts on, you know, astrophysics, space travel, astrophotography. We don't touch any of that. We found our own little niche and that's sort of our corner of the podcast world.
Bill McGeeney:That's what I love about it. You guys went in a great detail on sketching.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, yeah, chris is a big sketcher, and what's been very interesting with the show is we have a lot of listener engagement. We really encourage people to email us and we have a lot of interesting conversations that way too. But what has been very interesting is some of the areas of big time interest, and one of them is sketching. There's a lot of people out there observing and sketching, and Chris is one of them, and that's why we continue to talk about it, because there's a lot of folks out there doing it too.
Bill McGeeney:Now I'll take sketches when I'm doing visual observing, but they don't at all. There's no art to it. There's no art to it. It's a very rudimentary as a circle. One says North and I try and recount everything that's in there. Maybe I'll put an arrow that says red or you know, like yellow for the star color, or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
Shane Ludtke:You're, you're way ahead of me. I just use words. I don't even try to draw.
Bill McGeeney:That's. That might be smarter. All right, you spend a good amount of time looking there back and forth and hoping you're just not making stuff up when you're doing it. Yeah forth and hoping you're just not making stuff up when you're doing it.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, yeah for sure. Well, let's finish out the show. We have just three articles and they're good ones. They're quick and enjoyable. So firefly demand continues to rise. This year, two places in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Conagra National Park look to be the epicenters for the curious. Both parks now utilize lottery systems to protect the firefly viewing and matthias. Have you seen an evolution in how the public handles and understands how to react? Like, how to act at night, like? Is there behavior change that from the beginning, when you start working public at night, to maybe nowadays, where they might be a little more used to doing night stuff?
Matthias Schmitt:people have gotten better, and especially when they come to all the stargazing parties. It's a slow process, but it's a worthwhile process.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah, I feel like people are. They intuitively know to use a red light now.
Matthias Schmitt:Yeah.
Bill McGeeney:It's not all of them, but I feel like they'll come and they won't necessarily use the white light blasting in the face or they seem much more, not something totally foreign. But I know that other places say for the Perseids up at Mount Rainier last year they had a major problem with just trash and everything. So hopefully we continue to kind of move in the right direction instead of bringing some of that daytime crap into the night. Anyway, different gripe, different gripe. Anyone looking to build their own observatory cabin? I know Chris just built that. Right, shane, he has, the dream is built.
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, yeah, he's most of the way through his project, but it'll be great when he's done. He's housing a seven inch refractor in there. It will be quite nice, and it's probably about a 25 minute drive from my front door, so I'll be spending a lot of time there as well.
Bill McGeeney:Seven inch refractor. How. I don't even want to know how much that costs, but this thing, how big is this?
Shane Ludtke:I forget the focal length. It's a fast refractor. I want to say it's like an F6 or 6.5. So I think it's only, I think maybe 1500 millimeter, but I can't remember. I think it's only, I think maybe 1500 millimeter, but I can't remember. It's not as large as like some of those nine inch I-star or F8 or F10s, but it's still big. It's still an enormous telescope. It weighs probably a ton. Yeah, yeah, I think it's pushing 30, 35 pounds, something like that.
Bill McGeeney:That's why you permanently mount it.
Bill McGeeney:Yeah yeah, well, here in the US, if anyone's looking for an observatory cabin with last month's Dark Sky Sanctuary designation in southern Oregon, the Oregonian ran an article that showed some land options for potential buyers. Plenty of fixer-uppers to be had, including an RV, shelter, slash, laundry, maybe. Structure is probably the most graceful term. That's located on about three acres for 110K. If you have spare change, why not take a look at a 2,400 square home on 21 acres for 520K? Or maybe the city of Lakeview is for you. You can snag 20 acres of land along the Renner Lake for like $49,000. And, of course, you can build your home on top of that. So options for people who want to move to where there are stars.
Bill McGeeney:And closing out today, I want to get everyone in to move for galaxy season. It's one of my favorite times of year. Astronauts like myself and Shane will know that when the plants start blooming and you start having bird migration come through, the galaxies start popping up in the sky, and it's one of the coolest times of year. So how about a trip to Saskatchewan? Saskatchewan is home to two dark sky preserves, including Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, dark Sky Preserve how do you say that fast? And then the Bortle One, grasslands National Park, dark Sky Preserve and Shane. You sent over an image that you took in grasslands. It's spectacular like it, and that was just what.
Shane Ludtke:Like one, a 20 second shot, or something or it was one five minute frame, a five minute frame on a tracker yeah, yeah, it looked great.
Bill McGeeney:So yeah, you definitely this article sold me on. Cypress hill seems like a really awesome place. You can do everything there mountain bike you go, you go do some hiking, kayaking, and then grasslands. Is that closer to Montana?
Shane Ludtke:Yeah, yeah, right on the border with Montana, it's actually the shore. So what was it? 60 million years ago there was a giant inland sea in North America here and that's kind of the northern shore of where that inland sea was. So the topography is quite spectacular. It's kind of badlandish, but right on the border with Montana and it's one of the least populated places around here. At one point they set up a microphone in the park and it was over 12 hours before it picked up. Any human made noise because there's like the flight paths are not anywhere near there. So it's a very desolate place and and you know, desolation is music to somebody's ears looking for darkness, because you take away people and you take away the lights.
Bill McGeeney:Sign me up. Yeah, it's a good equation. So if I fly into a Virginia, how far away am I driving?
Shane Ludtke:So if you want to go to grasslands National Park, it's about a three and a half hour drive. Cypress Hills is about four hours. Cypress Hills is not quite as dark but it's the highest elevation in Canada east of the Rockies, so you have some elevation. It's dry, so there's no mosquitoes, which is quite nice for us astronomers. And the elevation, you know, you do feel that a little bit. In terms of sky conditions it's quite nice. But my favorite is grasslands. It's very dark and I kind of enjoy the desolation. It's a neat experience. And maybe one last plug is that our province is exceptionally flat, except for a couple of areas. And you know, for an astronomer that also means you have horizon to horizon views and that's kind of unique. There are a number of dark places to go, but you know, sometimes there's mountains or other things in your way and you don't have that here, so it's quite spectacular.
Bill McGeeney:Wow, and, as you said, like four hours, that's not bad at all. That's, that's a very manageable drive Wow.
Jeff Buler:That's exceptional.
Bill McGeeney:You guys are very, very lucky and continue doing what you're doing. I love the show, so I want to thank you at home for listening today. I know we went kind of on the deep end on birds and I hope some of you guys really enjoyed that. I also want to thank my guests Matthias Schmidt, Jeff Buehler and, of course, Shane Luckey. Thank you guys. Thank you for coming on to the show. As a reminder, Light Pollution News is recorded on the last Sunday of each month. We actually recorded a week earlier this month, but typically it's the last Sunday. So you can find all the details included in the show notes over at lightpollutionnewscom. If you have any questions or thoughts or want to say hi, feel free to reach out to me directly at Bill at Light Pollution News. Once again, I'm your host, Bill McGinney, Thanking you for listening. Remember to only shine a light where it's needed. Thank you guys. Thank you.