Protecting our Dark Skies

Best of luck everyone, this is an area certainly suffering an attention deficit, especially in some of our cities.

Michael W

The petition may not be necessary if all the lights go out. !

Martin

In my area we are lucky my council has just changed all of our lights in the street to down lighters and nice low wenergy ones so viewing is cool. NIce t meet you

This is pretty informative (click on the "large" link for a better view).

(Note that it doesn't depict light pollution per se but plots the affect of that pollution on the visual appearance of the night sky).

Edited By Bandersnatch on 01/07/2016 01:27:15

Led Street lighting may not be the boon to astronomy that it appears. The down lighter aspect is positive as it reduces the emissions required for the lamp and for the naked eye generally the sky will be darker. However the big plus for Low Pressure Sodium Street Lamps even if they light up the sky is that the emissions are confined to the two wavelengths around 589.3nm which for telescope users is simple to filter out. Introduction of wide band emitters means we lose this capability. So as with most things there is a balance to be struck.

regards Martin

Hi all,

I'd like to update that the petition closed with a signature total of 11638 so a response from the government was posted. It laid out a lot of retrospective legislation which can be built on.

I'm sure those that signed will have received an email detailing the response which gives various links to how the law stands.

I would like to thank all those again that supported this to say myself and others will continue to pursue the protection of our dark skies for the sake of the stars, nature and health and look further into what can be done to reduce the light pollution within the existing legislation and by pushing for changes to further enforce this.

Best regards

Damian

Thanks Damian

Neil