October 2024: See the Stars, Share the Stars!

A lot to discuss this month! Host Bill McGeeney is joined by an expert panel featuring the astronomer and artist, Dr. Tyler Nordgren, photographer and Youtuber, Nico Carver, and, thought leader and CEO of Visibility Innovations, Nancy Clanton.

See Full Show Notes, Lighting Tips and more at LightPollutionNews.com. Like this episode, share it with a friend!

Bill's Picks:

• Rehabilitation outcomes of bird-building collision victims in the Northeastern United States, PLOS ONE. 
  
  
• The effects of artificial light at night on spider brains, Biology Letters.
  
  
• In Iceland, humans throwing baby puffins is a good thing, Alisha McDarris, Popular Science
  
  
• Piraeus Tower is a Greek high-rise icon revived through sustainable strategies, Ellie Stathaki, Wallpaper* 
  
  
• Outdoor nighttime light exposure (light pollution) is associated with Alzheimer’s disease, Frontiers in Neuroscience. 

Chapters

• 13:45 Green Architecture and Citizen Science
• 29:56 Effects of Light on Human Health
• 38:04 Starry Skies and Mental Health Research

Transcript

Bill McGeeney: 0:06

light pollution news, october 2024. See the stars, share the stars. Today there's a conflicting study on the night shift melatonin levels, a citizen science project on moths that you could do yourself and a new tower in greece sets the standard for green, including reducing light pollution. What about all I have for you this month from the youtube channel? Nebula photos sets the standard for green, including reducing light pollution. What a panel I have for you this month From the YouTube channel Nebula Photos. Nico Carver joins me, thought leader and entrepreneur Nancy Klan. Oh, and we also have this guy you might know him, mr Todd Norgum, our new light pollution news. Let's finish out the month of october, and it kind of pains me to say that september and october such great months. I'm sure we're just talking nico. I'm sure it's up there in boundary waters. September, it's probably a great time to be up there, yes for sure.

Bill McGeeney: 1:06

Well, I want to reintroduce you at home to my guests this month. I have with me the man who needs no introduction. If you have done astrophotography, you know Nico Carver over at Nebula Photos, the YouTube channel, very excited to have you on. And then we have someone who actually consults on dark chocolates for the holiday season and you can get your hundreds of dollars of dark chocolates by talking with Mr Tyler Norgren. Tyler, welcome back to the show. And I have a guest who by far and away, is the most experienced in the world of technical lighting CEO of Visibility Innovations, a lighting designer by trade, ms Nancy Clanton. And Nancy, we kind of skimmed over all of the cool things you were working on at the beginning of last show and I want to give you some space here. So I wonder if you could dive into what is Visibility Innovations and what do you provide? What services do you provide for people?

Nancy Clanton: 2:01

Hey, bill, I'm kind of it's buy for people. Thank you, bill. It's a company all on my own and I started it up when I started easing back from my other company of Clanton Associates, which I was CEO for 45 years, and it's kind of like I wanted to do something that was different. But I'm still joined at the hip with Clanton Associ associates for all the engineering. But what Visibility Innovations is all about is I want to be a thought leader. I want to go and look at something and listen and observe and then bring in the right team for exactly what can help this community. And currently we're working with some indigenous communities in Alaska.

Nancy Clanton: 2:50

And I mentioned Cordova, alaska, where the utility manager called me and said Nancy, we need to reduce our energy for our street lighting. And I went well, clay why? And he, and he went well, we can't afford the diesel costs. I went hmm, yeah, let's talk about diesel energy. And so getting up there looking at it and talking to the fisher folk up there on how the lights shining out over the bay are affecting the salmon and the bird migration and all of that Northern lights they can't see them or the tourism, I went let's dig down into this, and so that's what it is, and to bring the best team in the world to help solve, or to at least innovate about, a situation like that. So that's kind of where I am right now. What part of Alaska?

Bill McGeeney: 3:52

is that in?

Nancy Clanton: 3:53

It's in the southwest Alaska and it is, you know, the Copper Delta. Some of the best salmon in the world they were. Cordova was the one community that oil spill from the Valdez almost destroyed and they're kind of isolated because earthquakes have taken out their roads and everything and they're trying to go 100% renewable energy. It just touches your heart. You want to help.

Bill McGeeney: 4:26

This is a really great story and I'm really excited that you're doing this. How are they capturing it in the wintertime, I guess? How are they capturing their energy? How's that work? What renewables are they using?

Nancy Clanton: 4:38

Well, right now, that's when they're using their diesel. And my dream is during the summertime, using their diesel. And my dream is during the summertime, when you've got excess hydro and excess solar and even some tidal generation, maybe make green hydrogen during the summertime and use that for the fuel, because you hydrogen, basically the byproduct is water. Because you hydrogen, basically the byproduct is water. And to use that and the fisher folk have asked to use hydrogen for their boats and everything.

Nancy Clanton: 5:11

So it's really an isolated island community I mean, it's not an island but it's isolated that we, if we can do it in cordova, we feel we can do it anywhere in the world. And we're also working with, again with the birds and the salmon, travis Lancor, who's with UCLA. Travis has mapped out over 600 species and their sensitivity, different colors of light, and Travis hasn't really done anything north of California and he said with the differences in seasonal, you know the duration of dark and light, he went. We can learn so much by going up there. So Travis is part of our team and others and what we're learning, it's really great.

Bill McGeeney: 6:04

That is a bunch of all-stars.

Tyler Nordgren: 6:07

Travis is a great guy. I've talked with him many times. But I actually grew up in Alaska and so when you talk about the effects of light pollution up there, especially in the wintertime when you have everything is blanketed in snow, it just makes all of whatever bad lighting you might have. It makes it so much worse. And I can say between my childhood up there in the 80s and going back, I lead Northern Lights trips up there. Now. In those 30, 40 years that have passed I've got friends from high school up there who tell me they haven't seen the Northern Lights in decades because Anchorage has just gotten so bright so it really has an outsized impact. I'm so glad you're working with communities up there on that. It's heartbreaking to think that in the great white north in Alaska you can no longer see the Northern Lights in some places.

Nancy Clanton: 7:00

Now it's really it's exciting and how open this community is and how kind that I'm going. Yeah, I really really want to help Radova.

Bill McGeeney: 7:13

Well, let's kick off the show here. So I want to remind you at home that you can learn all about today's show by heading over to our website, lightpollutionnewscom, where we have all the links to today's show listed and additional details about today's guests. Also, be sure you're subscribed to Light Pollution News. If not, simply hit the subscribe button in whatever podcast player you're listening to, and you can find Light Pollution News on LinkedIn, instagram, facebook or wherever you really look. If you wish to reach out to me directly, it's Bill at lightpollutionnewscom.

Bill McGeeney: 7:45

We have a lot here in the second half, so how about we get into it? Starting off the second half of this month's show, I do have this warmup here. This really isn't a story per se, but it's kind of like the way back machine. I dialed it back to about 12 months ago when, nico, on your Nebula Photos page, you suggest the idea of space-themed pumpkin carving, and I think you know it is the season. So what pumpkins might everyone be planning to do for this October? Nico, do you have any good guidance on some space-themed pumpkins we should be doing this year?

Nico Carver: 8:20

So last year I did natural phenomena, I did the moon and the Pleiades star cluster, but I think this year I might do space telescopes. I might do Hubble and James Webb or Spitzer or something. So any kind of space telescope that has an interesting shape I think could make a good carving.

Bill McGeeney: 8:39

Anyone else? Tyler, I feel like you will be out there carving pumpkins too.

Tyler Nordgren: 8:43

Oh, I do, but I'm old school, I just got that big knife and I'm lucky if I get two eyes and a nose and a mouth in there.

Bill McGeeney: 8:51

It's going to be pretty technical, man. That's good. I like the approach, nico, I can't wait to see those. You going to do another video of that.

Nico Carver: 8:58

Maybe the last one didn't perform too well. I don't know if people are used to thinking, oh yeah, niko pumpkin carving, but my last name is Carver, so I feel like I sort of set them up for it. I don't know.

Bill McGeeney: 9:09

Just have to be wearing a pumpkin head and use a knife and see where that goes. We had two interesting pieces of AstroTech that rolled through this month. It's kind of our advertising space. It's interesting to see it out there. Night vision binoculars for nighttime advertisers. Nighttime birding so you could see owls. I know it's migration season. We've been out looking birds all the time. There's a lot of cool warblers coming through. The other is the Celestion Origin, which sports a six-inch mirror and apparently has relatively a noisy motor, but it also weighs 41 pounds. A noisy motor, but it also weighs 41 pounds. We start seeing these new technologies coming out. First, the binoculars. The whole idea of having assisted binoculars is, I guess it's probably not new, but I feel like the technology right now is really taking off. Nika, have you seen a lot of people kind of dive into these style of like assisted binoculars or binoculars that? You know we're talking night vision, but I know that there's some out there that I think have special filters on them as well.

Nico Carver: 10:12

Yeah, there's two sort of technologies I see. One is the night vision, and some visual astronomers have gotten into that and it's cool for seeing certain things in the night sky, like the horse head nebula really comes out in the night vision binoculars or eyepieces really well. Another thing that's on the cusp is a camera built into an eyepiece basically, so it's showing you a picture but it's in the conventional eyepiece. There's something coming out from Pegasus pretty soon. That's going to be that. So it's. Yeah, it's interesting. Like you were sort of saying earlier, it's not really the same as the photon actually just striking your eyes straight through optics. So I don't know if these new pieces of technology are going to take off or not, but they're always trying something new.

Bill McGeeney: 11:02

Yeah, I remember using the enhanced eyepiece and to me it wasn't. Wasn't as great Still really cool, but it wasn't as great.

Nico Carver: 11:12

Hey, maybe it'll appeal to some and not to others, I don't know.

Bill McGeeney: 11:14

Yeah, and that's really all that matters. Right, you know you find your thing and you go with it. I think that's pretty amazing. I mean just on the idea of doing nighttime birding, that's not something that was a thing four years ago. Right, you can actually do it, and I know there's people like we've done this. You put a mic out and you track, kind of the bird migration and you try and register that back based on the audio signatures. Again, that's partly because you have these large language models that can kind of help you figure out who the hell that bird is.

Nico Carver: 11:48

It reminds me. Actually, speaking of light pollution, I've seen nighttime fishing. I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but that creates a lot of light pollution the way they do it, because they have to shine a very powerful light and I guess they're going for fish down in the deeper part of the lake or something. But I've seen this now a number of times that I'm like. I find it quite annoying as an astronomer if I'm ever set up on a lake the nighttime fishermen with huge lights shining down into the lake.

Bill McGeeney: 12:13

I never heard them do that on a lake.

Nancy Clanton: 12:15

Well, nico, fish are attracted to light, and so what the lights shining into the lake is doing is attracting the fish shining into the lake is doing is attracting the fish, and this has been a big issue, with a lot of countries banning putting lights into the ocean or into the lake to do it. No, they're doing it because the fish come and gather around it, just like in Alaska, they're saying no more lights in the river or the lake, but that's why they're doing it.

Nico Carver: 12:47

So just like insects are drawn to the light, the fish are too, I guess. Yes, they are Wow.

Nancy Clanton: 12:52

You got it Well not cool but interesting to me.

Nico Carver: 12:54

I didn't know that's why they were doing it like that. That's interesting to know.

Bill McGeeney: 12:58

Yeah, you don't have to go too far to see that. Right, you saw it in Lake, I know we see it. When you go down florida, you can see people shine light off fishing piers and you know. Again, the same idea is to attract your prize. Essentially, you know and we had an article last month just on that how to actually, when you're, I believe it was some type of maybe it wasn't trout fishing, I don't know what it was some I can't recall the specifics, but they were saying how you turn off all the lights because you don't want to spook some fish, and so it's. You know it's a game. But yeah, to Nancy's point, what Nancy said is exactly right. You know we have a lot of documentation on how fish will be drawn, just like birds are drawn to light. But we have a feel good story here. I don't want us to start off depressed with depressed news.

Bill McGeeney: 13:45

In Greece, a high-rise that was initially constructed during a dictatorship era of the 1970s has received new life. 24-story tall, the Piraeus Tower in Athens stands out as the second tallest building in Greece, and the building itself housed limited occupants in its lower floors but remained unfinished until 2023. The building has a wavy appearance due to the angles of the louvre. However, the wavy appearance actually acts to reduce the heat absorption and also, in a more pertinent manner, it actually reduces the tower's overall light pollution impact. So this tower is finished. The green architecture that we're seeing here in ANSI, we've seen green architecture in periodic spots. Right, we see some communities struggle to put in any kind of eco-friendly policies, but this was something that they actually deliberately went out and tried to spruce up in a green way. So do these examples, do these change the needle a little bit? Are we seeing more of these and not even realizing it?

Nancy Clanton: 14:53

Yeah, definitely. Again, we keep thinking that animals and birds and everything see light and color exactly the way we do, but they don't. Many of them go into the ultraviolet. They can see that where you know many animals only see. We call them biconal and we're triconal, and so that's. Travis is the one who has all of these spectral sensitivities. So if you can limit the light coming out of the building, that will not affect the birds. It's huge to do that, and because they are affected by ultraviolet light, so I think it's a tremendous way of going forward with this.

Bill McGeeney: 15:43

Have you seen in your, just in your experience? Have you seen more places when you're consulting with people or businesses or however they're doing any kind of architecture, renovation and whatnot, to really consider green approaches?

Nancy Clanton: 15:58

Absolutely. You know, the US Green Building Council just really pushes into everything green and they have wonderful credits about light pollution and how to minimize that. And it's not just the color of the light, but it's the backlight, the uplight, the glare we call the bug ratings, and it's really amazing. But also, just if no one's around, turn the lights off. You don't need them, and this is what we are really emphasizing in buildings not to have your lights on when somebody has vacated the area. You know, with occupancy sensors and even a lot of buildings have timers where, hey, at a certain time, all lights go off, and I think that that is something that is definitely going into green architecture now and it saves energy. That's a good thing.

Bill McGeeney: 16:58

So true. Well, we got additional news for bird lovers. That was, the lights on a gateway arch back in September actually turned off, as St Louis sits in a path of the Mississippi Flyway, which is a high-density north-south migration path for migratory birds. Why this matters is because new detailed research in the journal PLOS One, where the team looked at patterns of survival and release history for upwards of 3,100 billion collision victims In terms of light pollution. There are two takeaways from this article. First, fall migrants suffered the highest number of collisions and second, researchers grimly contest the apparent conservative estimate of 1 billion birds killed each year via collision and they believe the number actually is a little higher than that, which is kind of sad. But wait, we're not out of the bird news just yet. Do you guys ever want to just throw a bird?

Nancy Clanton: 17:54

no, I don't wait. You mean like a birdie in golf? Yes, so not with that, but but no.

Tyler Nordgren: 18:05

You're not talking about flipping a bird, are you?

Nancy Clanton: 18:08

No, no, no, no, no. We don't do, we don't flips no-transcript.

Bill McGeeney: 18:38

In a city, they utilize moonlight as guidance at night and think that the city is where they want to go. So volunteers actually go out with minimal, probably, light on their head, but they go and they pick up these birds and they essentially lift them up and toss them off a cliff and the birds can fly. They're not flying, they're not just dropping, they can fly. It's fun to watch. It sounds way worse than it is, but since I have at least one notable photographer here, I wanted to talk a little about this article. This is a really cool one. It comes to us from Robin Ross over at Texas Monthly, where a biologist named Curtis Eckerman uses light traps to inventory and photograph moth populations. Specifically, eckerman uses a portable ultraviolet light Nancy, which of course, he switches off once the inventory is completed. The article itself is loaded with great information regarding moths. I highly recommend you take just a second to read it.

Bill McGeeney: 19:35

In the meantime, ackerman's data collection falls right into this age of citizen science. That includes birders utilizing phone apps such as Merlin, astrophotographers combining forces to collect and analyze deep sky phenomena, say planetary nebulas, with professional astronomers, as our past guest Drew Evans continues to do, and, in Eckerman's case, a thorough undertaking of ecological health and assistance with the phone app iNaturalist. So two notes, specifically as it pertains to light pollution here. First, as we have been made aware of this year, artificial light at night serves to disorient the orienteering mechanism of moths. However, here's something that I wasn't fully aware of is that artificial light can also lure moths to lay eggs under light sources as opposed to nesting on a plant, thereby reducing the viability of larvae. Age of citizen science is pretty astounding, and I feel that you know, tyler, you would have some great thoughts on that. And Nico, do you do any of this citizen science yourself?

Nico Carver: 20:36

So before I went full-time on YouTube, I worked at the Center for Astrophysics, which is on the site of the Harvard College Observatory, and this is a place where sort of the history of astrophotography happened. Right, it was the first place to sort of take just thousands and thousands of glass plate photographs of the night sky, and so one of my jobs there was to do citizen science to help preserve and transcribe a lot of that history. So we had all the notebooks of the astronomers going back to like the 1850s, but because they were their handwritten notes of like observing the night sky, even machine learning struggles with like understanding their handwriting. So what we did is we went to a platform called the Zooniverse, which is like a. It's already set up as like a citizen science platform. Originally it was for identifying different kinds of galaxies, but we used it to transcribe these notebooks and find interesting insights in them.

Nico Carver: 21:30

So that was one project I helped lead, but then I'm also just interested in all the citizen science projects that are going on. There's really fun things for amateur astronomers. If you have a fairly big telescope you can do an exoplanet follow-up because you know we detect things, but then they need to basically confirm so you can actually capture a light curve, and it's just. There's a lot of really cool stuff.

Tyler Nordgren: 21:54

Yeah, and I worked with the astronomers and the birders out in St Louis for the Gateway Arch.

Bill McGeeney: 22:00

Oh, did you this story right here?

Tyler Nordgren: 22:02

Yeah, we had plans back in 2020 to have a big science and art interdisciplinary exhibit out that was going to travel around St Louis and well, that all fell apart with the pandemic. But one of the things that came out of it is I worked with them to design a poster for Gateway Arch. It's on sale there in the Visitor Center. Specifically talking about turning off the lights, saving the sky. I came up with a slogan see the stars, share the stars, and so the poster depicts the arch with not only the constellations of Cygnus, the swan and Aquila, the eagle, but you've also. Then we incorporate all the various different types of birds that do migrate along that the Mississippi, showing them flying overhead with those celestial birds as well, to get people to think about who we are sharing that night sky with, for all those those reasons that you've already talked about.

Bill McGeeney: 23:02

Oh, that is really cool. I did not know this Tyler. That is, that sounds really amazing. I did not know this Tyler. That sounds really amazing. I have to look up on the news posters.

Tyler Nordgren: 23:08

It was one of the posters I was just so proud of. And then, when the pandemic happened and shut everything down, I was afraid oh, this was never going to see the light of day. But it's managed to come back out again and has been quite popular. Yeah, great stuff, wow.

Nico Carver: 23:21

While we're on birds, I just thought of something which is amateurs also can make discoveries. Now it's becoming even more and more common, and during the pandemic I discovered a reflection nebula that had never been published about in any of the professional research, and I named it the Hummingbird Nebula, which just hit my mind. I was like, yeah, we're talking about birds and astronomy, this would be a good time to bring it up. So I found this little reflection nebula in Cepheus that was never talked about in any of the professional literature, and so I gave it a popular name for people that wanted to go look for it. Wow, that's great.

Nancy Clanton: 23:58

Yeah, and another and Bill another thing about birds that people don't realize. They do follow waterways and many times communities will put bridges across a waterway and go, oh, let's light the bridge, and you know it's beautiful and all of that. And the birds get caught in the bridge too. They get disoriented because they're following the moon. But this is really important that no light goes up. It's the color that's not affected by the birds, and no light goes down into the water when you're doing your bridges. So very, very important.

Bill McGeeney: 24:39

Father losing battle here in Pennsylvania on that one. The Delaware River is kind of its own authority, so it's not really New Jersey or Pennsylvania, and they went and updated the bridges. Where they have a plan to update the bridges lighting, and I don't think that we're going to be able to get a more responsible approach to that, I should say, because everyone just wants to see that bridge lit. I think Ken Walczak was on here a couple shows back and he said you know, there's something about a void, that void of space. They just want to have it, have it lit. So, nancy, I need to really go to your school to be able to go out there and wallow these people, all right.

Nancy Clanton: 25:17

So You're all welcome to come to Alaska, Tyler. You'll be going home. You can do it. You will be blown away at what we can do up there and take that lesson and apply it across the world.

Bill McGeeney: 25:37

Well said. I can't say anything more to that one. Let's continue on the ecology side. So what if exposure to artificial light actually shrunk your brain? So researchers in an article published in Biology Letters found that artificial light at night did just that to spiders. Scientists aren't really sure what's driving the change beyond the exposure to a 24-7 daytime environment, but the preliminary study used micro-CT scans to assess spider brain size. Also in the world of spiders, a study from Acta Oecologica found that artificial light at night affected the abundance of cobwebs, web density and body size of the Juro spider, a colorful web-building spider in Tokyo. It turns out that under artificial light at night, spiders spun more webs, but kept them smaller. In areas with artificial light, body sizes of spiders did not change under light.

Bill McGeeney: 26:34

Another case for a predator perhaps leveraging gravitational pull of artificial light to obtain more prey. And then I thought this one was pretty cool obtain more prey. And then I thought this one was pretty cool. I came across this one doing my news feed and it talks about photoluminescence on the feet of Mexican free-tailed bats. Under ultraviolet light they have a photoluminescence on their feet. It's kind of cool, nico. You're saying about all the little things that we're seeing these days and the way the science is going, and that's a way to use light to actually identify new aspects of our surroundings.

Bill McGeeney: 27:09

Finally, I think this is our last ecology article of the month A study looked to assess the impact of light pollution on fish larvae food sources, the rotifer in this case. Specifically, it looked to see how light affected a rotifer based on its food source, which rotifers are like. Algae Study looked into algae which inhibit growth of the rotifer under white light and, conversely, looked at a different food source, phaeocytus, which actually experienced growth and wasn't inhibited under white light. Overall, white and red increased the propagation of rotifer, but it also decreased their lifespans. One thing to note the food quality appears to have an effect on a rotifer's ability to overcome negative effects of artificial light at night. And finally, rounding out our ecological news this month, field crickets appear to be affected by artificial light at night. In a study in behavioral ecology, artificial light dealt crickets a double whammy. First, crickets had to limit some of their activity pertaining to nutritional investment and immunity, encapsulation or reproduction, and then, second, female crickets had to manage trade-offs between the nutritional immunity and reproduction. So that's ecology for this month.

Bill McGeeney: 28:18

I don't think there's anything too crazy in there. I do have some health ones, though, and these are interesting. So, moving over to health news, there's a study that looked at 276 students between the ages 16 to 22 who, via utilizing self-reporting of nighttime light exposure, physical examinations which included weight, blood sampling, et cetera, and the use of a wrist-worn accelerometer, a study found that light at night increased inflammation of cardiovascular inflammation markers. It should be noted that the inflammation was more pronounced in females than males, and a two hours of vigorous exercise could help actually counter that inflammation, which includes cycling, running, et cetera. And then we have this one and I'm wondering if, nancy, you can actually help me on this one In a study that used the data of 20 participants, researchers attempted to gauge the impact of night shift work, ie light levels for nurses over 20 weeks by looking at salivary melatonin and personal light levels from personal measurement devices.

Bill McGeeney: 29:22

The study found no significant association between working night shift to impact melatonin levels for those night shift nurses. I will note that the study came to us via the Society of Light and Lighting, which is part of the Charter Institute of Building Services Engineers, and one of the leading researchers working with SISB is Dr Mariana Figueroa, who's credited on that paper? Sisb released a 2020 position paper where they intended to critically examine and refute many circadian health claims based on their critical assessment study methodologies. Nancy, what is SISB and how do I understand this study here? Do you know? Could you provide?

Nancy Clanton: 30:02

any insight? Well, yeah, it's. It's a very interesting study because, with melatonin what melatonin needs, that we, you know, produce it in our bodies. We need an absence of blue light in the daytime. We need serotonin, which is blue light coming in, usually in the morning, and it has to hit the bottom part of our retina. So the sky, the sky is blue and as the sun sets, only the red comes through the atmosphere because the blue light is being absorbed. I mean, it's really scattering for those of you who want to know that it's kind of our body saying, hey, time to slow down, we need to go to red spectrum.

Nancy Clanton: 30:52

And so what the study was was going wow, what about people and nighttime shift people that are just the opposite? They can't go outside in the morning and have this, they have to. Absolutely there, we were throwing them off their schedules. What is it and it's a very complicated study, because we do know that about the ones who aren't shift workers, that it does make a huge difference. And for all of you listeners, make sure you get away from your blue devices at night and put light, shift on everything, get out in the morning, take a 20-minute walk, get that blue coming down, but at night we need our melatonin to start producing and that's with an absence of low light, and I feel sorry for the shift workers. They need to go home, put dark masks on and maybe be, you know, exposed to something that will create melatonin.

Bill McGeeney: 32:01

Tyler, you work night shift probably right.

Tyler Nordgren: 32:03

I did a lot of that when I was a regular observer at observatories and it yeah it. It messes up your body and you do that day after day, night after night, week after week and you never feel quite right. But you know, as somebody who's given lots of talks used to be on the board of the International Dark Sky Association gave lots of talks out in national parks about what artificial light does, not just for astronomers, but how it affects animals and people, those stories about shift workers you know that was one of the important messages to get out there and those things really resonate with people. Because if they think that light pollution is just about astronomers not being able to see deep sky objects at their star parties, we don't get a lot of sympathy for that. But when people hear that this is affecting cute animals and sea turtles and puffins and people's health, then the message begins to resonate.

Bill McGeeney: 33:01

Yeah, tyler, that's an excellent point. I know I did some third shift once, I think, one year in college, right, when I was trying to get some extra money, and I've always wondered is it because it's daytime that I struggled, or is it because you always wanted to be up, because you want to see people, right?

Tyler Nordgren: 33:19

So I had a lot of good friends that were on the Mars rovers spirit and opportunity missions and when those rovers first got to Mars the science teams for them, the folks driving the rovers and planning out the missions they lived on Mars time, which is an extra 24 minutes or so than earth time, so they had watches that adjusted their schedules by an extra half an hour every single day. And these folks wound up becoming, you know, a few weeks. They were on this for three months and they found themselves moving throughout the night cycle, daytime, locking their windows, and they were with lots of other, their fellow friends and colleagues, but they were away from families and they were having to deal with. How do you deal with, essentially, being constantly jet lagged or, in this case, rover lagged, by working on another planet?

Nancy Clanton: 34:15

Yeah, and one thing that one of the best inventions or interventions I should say is from Dr George Brainerd at Jefferson Medical School. He has designed lighting for the space station and little cubicles that the astronauts can go in and kind of wind down to go to sleep, and the lighting. Basically, dr Brainard is the one who discovered the IPRGCs we call them intrinsically photosensitive retinoganglion cells at the back of our eyes that really start controlling our melatonin and all of that, and so he puts the astronauts into this I don't know like I'm going to say a phone booth, but a sleep booth where they slowly get tuned to the right color light and can wind down, and then, when it's time for them to wake up, it's reversed. So, yes, it's a problem, but yeah. So, yes, it's a problem, but yeah, tyler, you're right, it's the people on these space missions. You know where? What is it just?

Tyler Nordgren: 35:32

basically, it's a day and night situation for the people that are flying around the earth helping us yeah, yeah, folks in this international space station get day and night every 90 minutes and yeah, I, you know, I'd never actually really thought about that until you mentioned it.

Bill McGeeney: 35:46

That's brilliant I remember doing a john muir trail and a lot of people on the east coast got to experience this last year with all the fires and everything. But there were fires halfway on the trail and the smoke would. What it would do is in a morning, like, depending where you were in, the north side or south side of fire was where the wind was going to be, which half of the day, and going to the fire. I remember it was clear, the mornings were clear, the mornings were great, but once 12 o'clock hit, the winds shifted and everything turned like a Martian sky and that affected me and I remember being actually, you know, being, becoming lethargic one o'clock, two o'clock, becoming lethargic, and my body was just kind of like, all right, we're going to go to camp, we? You know, it was about dinner time and I just ate, you know, and I was, it's midway in the day and I could feel it physically affecting me.

Tyler Nordgren: 36:44

One of the things that I mean Nancy will know this for folks that live in the high north, high latitude regions. So, growing up in Alaska, when you go from summer into fall, you'd find yourself slowly going to bed earlier and earlier as the sun was setting earlier and earlier, and there'd be a point at which you'd have to break yourself of paying attention to what the sun was setting earlier and earlier, and there'd be a point at which you'd have to break yourself of paying attention to what the sun is doing in order to ignore it. And so the sun sets at about 3 pm, and so you've got the next, however many odd hours under artificial lights, and that really affects you after those long winters. You'd also have the same effect to the next spring, when you'd find yourself staying awake later and later and again like, ok, I need to ignore what the sun is doing and then find a way to ignore the sunlight that's out there.

Nico Carver: 37:36

I spent one summer in Fairbanks doing vegetable gardening or vegetable farming I guess, and I worked two jobs. I actually did the cruise ship stuff at night there was like land excursions and then I did the vegetable farming during the day and I was young enough where I just basically didn't sleep the entire summer. But it was definitely a weird experience, like you're saying, of just like with the sun never really setting, it really throws you off. I wouldn't want to do it again. I value my sleep a lot more now.

Bill McGeeney: 38:04

Well, coming off the heels of that story, we just have three more health ones here, and I'll note that these should be taken with a grain of salt, but they're using satellite imagery to try and pair correlations. I want to speak to them just because I've seen them in the news and I just want to bring them up. First up from environmental research, a study looked at how light pollution affected mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, and the findings of the study were using self-reporting by 4,000 Bulgarian adults found that there is some type of correlation between outdoor light pollution and mental health ailments. Next, again pairing satellite imagery to, in this time it's 9,752 Barcelonians found that there was an association of elevated heart and metabolism health issues with artificial light at night. And then we have this last one from Frontiers in Neuroscience that tried to associate artificial light again baseless satellite imagery with Alzheimer's disease. These results associate outdoor lighting with a strong association of Alzheimer's disease, beating out potential drivers, including alcohol abuse, kidney disease, depression, heart failure and obesity. So that rounds out our health news.

Nico Carver: 39:16

Bill, how do you do your research for this? How do you get all of these articles? Because I was previously an academic librarian, I was interested in sort of how people research these things around a particular topic like this, but you're going into so many different areas like ecology and health and all these different things.

Bill McGeeney: 39:33

Yeah, I mean, obviously the show is a wide berth, right? So you know, I just go and collect everything and then I'll do a week-long analysis on trying to pull everything together and trying to build the story and understand the facts around it. And you know, I'm not going to say I'm perfect at this, because this is a side hustle per se.

Nancy Clanton: 39:54

Well, I have a wish list. Okay, on the health side. All right, nancy.

Nancy Clanton: 39:59

For you guys scientists. We've been involved with UC Berkeley on a lot of research on looking outdoors at views, but they've all been daytime views. And what happens to your brain? You know you're looking at a math problem and you're solving it. Then all of a sudden you look outdoors and the whole brain activity switches to the back of your head and it relaxes you. And all of that we're working on again, equity of views for everyone, that everyone has that option to be able to look outdoors. And I said to the researchers what about the view of the stars? We're just doing daytime views. What happens? I mean I'll bring people out to look at the stars and I'll hear everyone gets quiet and they go oh, look at that. What are brain activity doing when this happens? It wouldn't be great to bring this back to everyone on earth that they can go outside and get that relaxation before they go to sleep? So that's my dream. That's an excellent dream.

Tyler Nordgren: 41:14

Yeah, one of the things I've really loved about the last five, six years is the research coming out of the psychology field about the, the idea of wonder and what it does. Oh, how that makes people feel. It changes them when they experience awe, usually with, like an amazing landscape, but also a view of the Milky way or a total solar eclipse or starling train.

Tyler Nordgren: 41:40

Right yeah, and you, you, you? You get that sense of awe and, according to this research, it it makes you feel more a part of the world. It makes you feel small but also connected to the universe above you, which you know. The Milky Way is the greatest sign that we are part of a vastly large structure in space, extending beyond our mere little planet here. But supposedly these are the things that make people suddenly open themselves up to feelings of connection, of care and being perhaps better stewards of themselves, the world, the earth and their communities. So, going right along with what Nancy's saying here, this is, I think, an amazing field that's coming along and gives us yet another reason for why we need to preserve these starry views, not just so again we can see some deep sky object, but just to really reconnect with ourselves and the universe around us.

Bill McGeeney: 42:42

Tyler, there was a movie right. There was a movie Grand Canyon. I didn't find it to be a really enjoyable movie. Tyler, there was a movie right. There was a movie Grand Canyon. I didn't find it to be a really enjoyable movie, but there was a movie based on that topic of the all. Just by going to having the main characters, I guess, drive to the Grand Canyon, if I recall, and right when you're there, when you're at these national parks, that's what you're doing, you're taking that in, you're forming that connection. So I think this is really cool. This would be a great burgeoning research area. Well, since you guys are talking and I'm trying to limp myself here we'll start with Tyler. Give you guys a chance to plug yourselves and plug what you're doing and where people can learn more about. In your case, tyler, where can people learn more about cruises or chocolate or really anything you want to promote? How can people learn more about you?

Tyler Nordgren: 43:28

So you can go to my website. It's spacearttravelbureaucom, and that takes you into the artwork that I'm doing for national parks, promoting that half the park is after dark ethos, but also it describes on there some of the other work I am. So I like leading tours. I mentioned we're going to Antarctica for the Southern Lights in March of 2025. In September of 2025, I'm leading a tour for Betchart Expeditions. They partner with the Planetary Society and we're going to Tanzania. There's a total lunar eclipse, but the trip is long enough so that while we see the lunar eclipse in the Serengeti, we're staying there long enough that we do actually get some dark skies and a chance to see the Milky Way going through the zenith overhead, so being out there with the wild animals and see the night sky the way human beings have for millions of years Sounds like great trips, man.

Bill McGeeney: 44:28

I need to find my way onto some of those. Nico, where can people learn more about Nebula Photos and really everything you do? You just did a gallery. You just closed up a gallery. How's that? How'd that go?

Nico Carver: 44:41

It was really good. It was my first time sort of showing my work in person like that, and so I was in Belmont, massachusetts, and I printed out 14 works and had an opening and got to meet a lot of people who had seen me online but never in person and got to sell some artwork and it was really fun. I enjoyed it a lot. I'd encourage any sort of astrophotographer who's unsure to go ahead and try printing their work, framing it up. It's really fun to see it hanging on a wall and get to talk to people in person. Looking at the work in person.

Nico Carver: 45:17

People can find me at com slash nebula photos. If you go to my most popular videos, you can get into some of this with simple gear. You know whether you have a cell phone and want to do star trails or have a DSLR and want to try to capture the Andromeda Galaxy or the Orion Nebula, and then if you are sort of like a hardcore fan of mine, then you can find my online community at patreoncom slash nebula photos online community at patreoncom slash nebula photos. So that's like a paid community but it starts at just one dollar a month and it's where we all get together.

Bill McGeeney: 45:51

We do zoom calls like we're on right now, but just everything astrophotography and when you did your gallery I guess what, just out of curiosity what images did you use?

Nico Carver: 46:00

my favorites. So, but I but I tried to do a variety, so my, I guess if it was up to me, it would be all nebulae, as you can imagine. That's my favorite, but I did do some of a total solar eclipse, a total total lunar eclipse, some other kinds of objects, cause I know those would be fun for people to do so, but mostly mostly nebulae. Yep, very cool.

Bill McGeeney: 46:24

Nancy, how can people learn more about you? Visibility, innovations, how can we follow this amazing transformation? Cordova right, cordova, alaska.

Nancy Clanton: 46:32

Yeah, cordova, alaska. Yeah, we have a website Visibility Innovations. It's pretty small, mostly just talking about being, you know, innovation leaders and trying to, yeah, thoughtful leadership on not just solving problems but keep going what if, what if, what if, and. But I'm tied at the hip with Clanton and Associates, which is the other firm that I'm working with and again founder of it, and that's the firm that actually helps communities design lighting ordinances and to go and do a community assessment of their existing lighting. What can they do, how can they change it. And they've been doing communities all over the United States and just going, working with the law enforcement and the stakeholders in the communities and doing public meetings and getting the community out, talking with everybody, not only the street lighting but the private lighting, and it's been wonderful and helping and educating the planners on how do you review lighting plans and how can the contractors learn.

Nancy Clanton: 47:56

And again, I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that the hardware stores and you all know what they are will just stop selling unshielded wall packs. How do we do this? And to educate the kids, mom and dad, you know we really don't need that light on. It's hurting the environment. Could you turn it off and just to get into the schools, bring sky meters in there and really teach the children on what the sky is all about. So that's kind of my dream.

Bill McGeeney: 48:33

Well, we have a story here where we're going to. You might be able to talk right about this, so let me jump right into it, since you had a great lead in. Thank you, nancy. The University of Alabama, birmingham has started up a new Campus Shine program, and Campus Shine at UAB is being run by an assistant professor in astronomy, dr Michelle Wooten. If you're not familiar with Shine, it's a collegiate initiative set up by the American Astronomical Society to bring awareness to light pollution. Was it started or did Mr Lowenthal have just some assistance in that role?

Nancy Clanton: 49:07

Nancy, and I'm a member of that program with AAS and it's part of their Compass program and what it is. It's a group of universities that are doing it. Many universities are really picking up on it. It's starting out on making awareness of their existing conditions on the university, getting the students out there to actually take and measure the lighting of where they are doing opti-collect you know where the light poles are everything surveys and getting the students involved and then helping the administrators on going. You know we'd like to change this lighting and here's some ideas on how to do it. So what the Campus Shine is all about is giving some guidance on how universities can not only educate the students but change their own campus lighting programs. And it's fabulous, yeah, I mean there's so many campuses involved in this right now that trying to get the word out to join AAS and to actually and James Lonewall, who is with Smith College, is kind of the chair of this whole committee and he's doing a fabulous job and herding us in because we want to go all over the place.

Bill McGeeney: 50:32

Great to hear. I look forward to seeing this actually coming to see a finished product on it. Right is that I guess any listeners or listener today would be able to think of as a college. That's like a big name college that's really diving all in on it.

Nancy Clanton: 50:51

Yes, there is UC Berkeley. We actually did a complete assessment of their campus and their campus planner has made it available to anyone to look at the whole progress and how you bring students out there, how you walk through the campus, how you do everything and then make what we call kind of priorities where there's areas that are issues, whether it's a safety issue when I say safety I mean more like tripping downstairs, not security, and all of that and just how they can actually take it and look at kind of revitalizing their entire campus lighting. And then they've got other ones that are doing it. Anschutz Medical Center has done it, but it's a slow progress and yet these campuses and these professors at these campuses are just taking the initiative and going strong.

Bill McGeeney: 51:59

Thank you for elaborating on all that detail. That's great Good news. We only have a few more minutes here and I know I've held you guys almost to a limit today. That's great Good news. We only have a few more minutes here and I know I've held you guys almost to a limit today. That's a rarity. So good job everyone. You've got a lot of great information in there.

Bill McGeeney: 52:13

Designations for this month Just want to talk about real fast. Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area in Colorado keeps racking up dark sky places. So congratulations on Gunnison as becoming another dark sky park. And then we also have the Isle of Rome all the way up in Scotland. Isle of Rome becomes the first dark sky sanctuary in the country, scotland's fifth designated dark sky place. Hey, you guys on the astrotourism side, it's been big and it's really big, and evidently astrotourism is starting to attract UFO tourism. So how do you guys feel? Do you think you'll be able to see something interesting and unique and share in that field with some people who might be very curious about some life forms coming down and running our government?

Tyler Nordgren: 52:56

So I'm working with a couple of cruise lines I was talking with them about. They're doing like this is Atlas expeditions. They're doing something like 11 astronomy themed cruises this year and they're small ships, but they told me that astronomy across their entire industry is huge. Now astronomers do northern lights or stars, and again it's just people looking to get away from their light polluted homes and see something unusual, both by day and by night. Will there be aliens? Hey, you never know. I've spent my entire life looking at the sky. I haven't seen any yet, but that doesn't mean it won't change tomorrow.

Nico Carver: 53:44

In November I'm going to be running my first Nebula Nights workshop in Southern Arizona, and so I have 10 people signed up and we're just going to be photographing and learning how to process photographs of nebulas, and so it's sort of astrotourism. I've rented out a ranch down there and it's all sort of inclusive all their meals and everything and hopefully it's a lot of fun and I keep doing it. I always get questions about like doing it up here in the Northeast and the issue is the weather. It's very hard to predict around the cloud, so that's why we're doing it down in Southern Arizona.

Bill McGeeney: 54:18

Yeah, you wouldn't have, you can't, you can't predict around this weather. I want to thank you at home for joining us today and I also want to thank my guests. You guys have been really amazing and I was really excited to have you guys all on and you did not disappoint. I think you got some great takeaways and some great information, and thanks so much for helping me get through the news today. As a reminder, light Pollution News is recorded toward the end of the month. This month's show was recorded on September 22nd. You can find all the details included in today's show over at lightpollutionnewscom. If you have any thoughts, questions, just want to say hi, you can simply text us via the link in the show notes or you can email us at bill at lightpollutionnewscom. Signing off today, I'm your host, bill McGeaney. Thank you for listening and remember to only shine a light where it's needed.