Down with Light Pollution

I admit that I don't like light pollution because it spoils the beauty of the nighttime sky. It obscures the majestic swath of stars across the sky that make up our Milky Way Galaxy (yes, this is what our naked eyes would see without light pollution - but a tad dimmer) and washes out the delicate structure of galaxies and nebula as seen through the telescope. Because of light pollution, many people are unaware that the Andromeda galaxy appears larger than the moon in our skies and can be seen with the naked eye.


The most useful lighting radiates downward illuminating our yards, roads, and parking lots. However, lighting that is poorly designed can radiate in all directions, thus wasting that 50% of the light that goes up into the sky and pollutes our view.

There are several negative consequences. Most obviously, energy is wasted. With simple reflectors that direct lighting downward, half the wattage is required to get the same amount of useful illumination.

Bright street lights that are not aimed downward can temporarily impair a driver's vision. Our campus at Washington State University has lighting in several places near crosswalks that is blinding to drivers and obscures pedestrians. I once almost hit a pedestrian at such a crosswalk.

As we age, our pupils respond more slowly under changes in lighting; so, older drivers that leave brightly-lit shopping centers have trouble adjusting to lower light levels as they leave the parking lot. Several accidents have been attributed to this effect.

Contrary to the claim of business owners that bright lights attract customers, studies show that glaring lights are less inviting and result in fewer customers. Many municipalities believe that bright lights reduce crime; but, cities that have reduced lighting levels have found crime rates to either stay the same or decrease. Ironically, the lighting at our local Walmart is of the full cutoff type, which sends the least amount of lighting upward.

Bright night lighting has other negative impacts on the environment. City lights are known to disorient migrating birds and have been found to be responsible for the demise of whole flocks of confused animals that flew into structures such as buildings.

Night lighting is also known to adversely affect our circadian rhythm, which requires periods of dark. The biological effects of bright nighttime lighting has also been associated with increased incidence of certain types of cancer.

Turns out that there is one other reason for eliminating light pollution. A form of nitrogen oxide in our atmosphere breaks down chemicals from vehicle exhaust and other man-made sources. However, this compound is destroyed by the sun, so this natural cleaner works only at night. Researchers at NOAA and CIRES found that light pollution also destroys the nitrate compound, so its cleansing effect is lost.

Let's fight light pollution so that we can save energy, decrease greenhouse gasses, protect wildlife, improve our health, and allow nature to clean the pollution that we create. All it takes is light fixtures that direct lighting downward. The icing on the cake is that decreased light pollution will allow us to once again stare in awe at the beauty of our universe, allowing photons that originated millions of light years away in other galaxies to directly tickle our optic nerves.

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In awe of majesty

The other day, we drove into the small Italian town of Orvieto, which is nestled in the hills of northern Italy. We parked our car near an old school, paid the parking machine, and walked up the hill to the central square. When we made the turn around the bend, the magnificent Orvieto Cathedral appeared in front of us. It was absolutely stunning.

The photos on the internet do not capture its beauty nor the awe that one feels standing in front of this huge structure, decorated throughout with centimeter-sized tiles laid carefully by teams of craftsmen. It must have taken thousands of man-years to complete.

The next day, we toured the walled town of Lucca, at one time home to a hundred churches and cathedrals. As we we walked from block to block, we saw many of them - magnificent pieces of art as well as impressive feats of engineering. We soaked in similar sights in Florence and Pisa.

In stark contrast, in the Museo Galileo in Florence, I found myself standing in front of a glass showcase with two modest telescopes that appeared to be made of lacquered cardboard. These Galilean creations, inferior both in quality and size to the small finder scopes that are attached to my telescopes, revolutionized our understanding of the solar system through careful observations of Jupiter's moons. In one great insight, Galileo moved the center of the solar system from the earth to the sun, 93 million miles away. I was in awe of his intellect. The beauty of a thousand exquisite cathedrals pale in comparison to the intellectual model of the solar system that he constructed.

In addition to discovering spots on the sun and craters on the moon, which shattered the Church's teaching of the perfection of the heavens, Galileo set the foundations for Newtonian mechanics and the theory of gravity, which describe the motions of the moons of Jupiter, the planets around the sun, the sun around our galaxy, and the motions of galaxies within larger clusters. More important than his discoveries, Galileo opened our eyes and minds to a new way of thinking - leading to an ever-deeper understanding of our universe that continues to our times.

While the priests pontificated on the virtues of ritual and the absolute truths held by the church, Galileo was uncovering the real truth, overturning centuries of dogma. It wasn't until 1822 that the Church lifted its ban on Galileo's writings, more than 200 years after he first turned his telescope to the heavens. In 1992, the Church apologized for its treatment of Galileo. This one man discovered the true beauty of the universe, which will continue to display its splendors well after the cathedrals have crumbled.

Nostalgia - a childhood of looking up to the heavens

I still get a chill down my spine when I see the dark blue sky after sunset, with bright stars, planets, and the moon decorating the view. As a youngster, I would spend hours staring at the sky, wondering what treasured lay hidden just out of view. In my junior year of high school, I finally got a respectable 6" telescope for gazing at the heavens.

The article on “Meteors in the Telescope” by Allan M. MacRobert in the July 2005 issue of Sky and telescope jogged a memory that I may have had taken a photograph of a meteor through my 6” reflector about 30 years prior. This got me frantically looking through piles and piles of family photos that were randomly tossed in several shoe boxes. After an evening of searching (and of course, pausing occasionally to marvel at pictures of me with hair or being awed by the incredible cuteness of my children), I finally found it! I was disappointed to see that the 3” by 4” photo showed signs of heavy abuse.

This had been my very first attempt at taking a photograph through a telescope, and Saturn was my target. It took me quite some time to center the planet in the telescope. Then I faced the frustration of mounting my camera and aligning it with the eyepiece. To make matters worse, the telescope was incredibly wobbly. However, nothing was worse than trying to focus the image through the finder of my 35mm camera. Finally, my brand new 6” reflector from Edmund Scientific was ready to go, so I pulled the trigger release. It took me all evening to get one shot, and I was mighty tired in school the next day from sleep deprivation.

After getting my pictures developed, I found an out-of-focus and overexposed image of the planet. However, I was proud of having caught what looked like a meteor. So, I taped the photo to the refrigerator. The years of re-taping the photo after falling under the fridge many times led to the fingerprints, tape marks, and sticky areas. Years of exposure to sunlight caused the colors to fade into a magenta hue with splashes of purple.

I recall having seen a flash of light in the camera’s finder on taking the shot. This could have been a memory that I conveniently added later upon getting the photo. For posterity, I scanned the legendary photo it into my computer at high resolution and carefully inspected it for clues. Could this have been an artifact?

Upon casual inspection, I believe that I indeed had caught a meteor. The head is clearly round, so it’s not a ghost image of Saturn. Furthermore, the small dim ghost of Saturn just below the image is clear evidence that the telescope jittered during the shot. Similarly, there is a small ghost of the meteor, just below and to the left of it - implying that it was not an artifact added at the film lab. The fact that the meteor’s ghost is displaced to the left implies that the meteor had moved after the ghost image was recorded. Though the image of the meteor looks suspiciously like a comet, I do not recall seeing one at the eyepiece. Given its brightness, I am sure that I would not have missed it. And the ghost image suggests that the object recorded was moving pretty quickly.

So, I believe that in my first attempt at astro-photography through a telescope, I nabbed a meteor in its tracks. I have never seen such a marvelously delicate tail in any meteor photographs (note that I did no processing after scanning the image aside from adjusting the color slightly to match the original print). Has anyone ever seen a similar image? I would be interested in hearing from anyone with similar pictures, or anyone with insights that support or refute my claim.

Almost a decade ago, I got back into astro imaging, though for the last few years, I have been too busy to use any of my telescopes. The advantage of being older is having the capital to buy decent equipment. For reference, I include a more recent shot (from 2004) that I took with a webcam coupled to my telescope. Telescopes have come of long way, not to mention the ubiquitous use of CCD cameras rather than film. I should get out more often!

Tavel and Context

The flip side of getting research funding is the requirement to attend yearly meetings to update the funding agencies on progress made in meeting milestones. I am sitting in my hotel room in Washington DC this morning getting ready for my presentation. I arrived last night at about midnight and I head back to the airport after I give my talk in the early afternoon.

I am reminded of the many quick work trips that I take to all kinds of neat places. But usually, all that I see is my hotel room, the conference room, and the road between the hotel and the airport. Each geographic location offers unique vistas and local culture (or lack thereof). But, in addressing the deepest questions, to me, sightseeing and travel provide only the most shallow returns.

An itinerary that highlights places that spawned ideas that changed civilization would be much more interesting to me. It would be awe-inspiring to see the simple objects used by Cavendish to do his famous experiments or to view Galileo's crude telescope in the natural setting of the Italian countryside, where his observations yielded insights into the true nature of the universe, overturning centuries of dogma and ignorance.

I would like to revisit the meeting room of the first continental congress, where the new paradigm of self governance took root and changed the world. Having recently read the biographies on James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, a visit to the birthplace of their great ideas would now be more meaningful to me.

While the site of the ruins in Rome were deeply moving based on the human ingenuity and appreciation for beauty that they exemplify, I found that the experience would have been more fulfilling had there been a broader intellectual context. Similarly, the Vatican and Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris are magnificent, and the fact that all those people labored for so many years to express their faith may be admirable, but I found the structures to be akin to beautiful facades harboring emptiness.

Events and places are meaningful to me only when there is an intellectual context. Contrast the zombie feeding coins into a slot machine for hours on end with the experience of understanding a deep idea for the first time. When I first took Quantum Field Theory, I recall the thrill of seeing the connection between fields and particles and how so many laws of physics arise from a variational approach (i.e. nature acts in a way that minimizes or optimizes a quantity). When struggling with my attempts to understand the fundamental limits of the nonlinear susceptibility, I recall the final stretch of my frenzied derivations with fondness: a beautifully-simple equation crystallized into its final elegant from out of a huge mess of mathematics. In that moment, I understood something new to the world for the first time.

Learning is characterized by long periods of drudgery, punctuated with the occasional elation of understanding. Similarly, humanity evolves through long cycles of stasis that are interrupted with abrupt paradigm shifts, which change the course of civilization. If I am forced to travel, my preference is to visit those places that produced singular moments that led to revolutions in thought.