Anyone out there own a Canon EOS 400D (AKA Digital Rebel XTi, AKA EOS Kiss Digital X) and have access to any of the following cities: Abu Dhabi, Athens, Baghdad, Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Copenhagen, London, Moscow, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo. Washington D.C., Wellington (NZ)?
If so, this thread on the SPA BB might be of interest to you.
I just received an email from the UK government's ePetition system to say that there has been a response to the floodlighting petition that I mentioned back in November 2006 (wow, really that long ago?).
You can see the response over here.
The office of the Prime Minister has given a response to a recent petition regarding light pollution.
I've had a quick scan of the response and, at the moment, I'm unsure if it's a good thing, bad thing or somewhere in the middle. I should probably take a careful look at the content of the response and compare it with the information I can find on the CfDS website.
The BAA website now has the results of the December and January star count.
Nearly 2,000 people took part in the star count. Only 2% of people who responded to our online survey said they could see more than 30 stars, compared to 54% who saw fewer than 10 stars in Orion – a level which indicates severe light pollution.Have a look at the article for a full breakdown of the results (there's also a map of the results too).
Back in December last year I reported on the BAA/CfDS/CPRE star count. Stuart picked up on this and, in the comments on Stuart's blog, Ian sort of got to thinking about an international effort to do something similar.
This morning I had an email from Robin Scagell, alerting me to Globe at Night. Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The international star-counting activity known as GLOBE at Night returns from March 8-21 in two flavors: the "classic" GLOBE at Night exercise that anyone can have fun doing with their unaided eyes, and a new effort to obtain precise measurements of urban dark skies using digital sky-brightness meters.It seems they're also using Orion as the patch of sky for doing comparisons and, helpfully, they have a set of magnitude charts to help in estimations (and don't you just love the fact that they've produced just such a chart from a cloudy night).
The GLOBE at Night 2007 program is intended to build upon the worldwide participation sparked by the first GLOBE at Night campaign in March 2006. This inaugural effort drew more than 18,000 citizen-scientist participants in all 50 U.S. states and 96 countries worldwide, who submitted nearly 4,600 observations of the darkness of their local night skies during the 10-day event. The program is designed to aid teaching about the impact of artificial lighting on local environments, and the ongoing loss of a dark night sky as a natural resource for much of the world's population.
There is another light pollution petition on the UK PM's e-petitions website. Unlike the last one, this one is more concerned with all forms of outdoor lighting:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ensure that all exterior lights are shaded to direct their light downwards, so as to prevent light pollution obscuring the beauty of the night sky.Shame about some of the problems with the text of the petition, but it's got to be worth a signature if you're in the UK.
For those who live in our towns and cities, the night sky is filled with a dull orange glow punctuated only by the dim glimmer of an occasional bright star or planet. Fitting well designed shades on all exterior lights would stop light leaking wastfully upwards, restoring the glorious beauty of a star strewn sky overhead. Bring back the milky way!
What is it with artists and light pollution?
According to this article in Louth Today Mablethorpe is to acquire an installation that is based around a "star". To make things more annoying "an electric light at the top of the Star will light up and change colour – creating a lighthouse effect". Around this are a series of lines in the ground, each one of them is supposed to represent "an important date in Mablethorpe's history", one of which is "the little known Mablethorpe meteor of 1898 which exploded in the sky over the resort".
So, let me get this right: they want to commemorate an event in astronomy by... creating light pollution? How very clever.
According to Michael Trainor, the "Manchester based artist" who designed it, "Mablethorpe is the only town in the UK to have its own star". I bloody hope so!
This seems to be turning into an evening of links via the SPA BB — sorry about that.
Via this post on the SPA BB: a European light pollution overlay for Google Earth and Google Maps.
It must be a week for this sort of thing. Not only do we have one UK paper running an article about how comet McNaught will affect your love life, I now see from an article on the SPA BB that a report in The Telegraph about the BAA/CfDS/CPRE star count talks about the British Astrological Association.
Is it really too much to ask of the popular press that they treat the subject anything close to correctly?
No, that's okay, I know the answer to that question.
The BAA are reporting that 72 observations of Orion were received in response to the Christmas star count. That might seem rather low but it's not surprising given how awful the weather was for many people during the allotted time (I was pretty much under a constant blanket of fog so never got to do a count).
Thankfully there's going to be a second attempt:
There is another chance as the survey will re-run over the next new Moon period, from Jan 14 - Jan 21, between 9.00-11.00 pm which is just right for catching Orion 'high in the sky.'
I don't think I've seen this reported anywhere else: the BAA, CfDS and CPRE have organised a star count to run from December 20th to the 24th. The idea is, at some point between those two dates, you go out between 20:00 and 24:00 and count how many stars you can see in the "square" formed by the main part of the constellation Orion.
More details can be found on the BAA website.
Andrew Abbott has created a petition for the Prime Minister to ban floodlighting of buildings to reduce energy use, carbon dioxide emissions and light pollution.
You can read the petition and add your signature, if you wish, here.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Floodlighting/
Summary of petition...
Floodlighting of buildings is done purely for our own vanity. It is a significant waste of energy.
The Energy Saving Trust is asking us to cut down on our energy use by 20%, yet private companies and government still waste significant amounts of energy on floodlighting buildings. Why should our taxes pay to floodlight government buildings?
The Government must ban the floodlighting of buildings. Even before legislation is introduced, the government could set a lead in this to encourage private owners by switching off the floodlighting of government buildings.
