Light Pollution speads from the city to the country. Stop the madness where you live.
I used to live in a big city. Crime was a fact of life. The police department would send semi-annual fliers to residents telling them different ways they could protect themselves against crime.
- Keep your garage door closed
- Keep the shrubbery trimmed around the windows and doors of your house
- Keep exterior lights burning at night
These were some of the suggestions. Keeping exterior lights on at one's residence contributes to light pollution. Street lights, stores and other businesses are all the basis of a city's light pollution. Adding lights from your own property not only contributes to the glow but is a drain on your pocketbook and on energy resources.
I'm sure you're thinking that if someone doesn't light their house up like a Christmas tree that they will be a criminal's target. Not necessarily so.
When I worked at Astronomy magazine, we got letters and phone calls from all kinds of people. Once we had a helpful reader engage in a nice long discussion with a colleague of mine about how constant lighting at a residence is helpful to burglars and other criminals who would want to enter your property. The man provided this insider information during one of his allotted phone calls from prison. He told my co-worker that bright lights were great for casting deep shadows where someone can hide. He recommended that if a person were really serious about safeguarding their home, that they use motion lights. The light flashing on will alert a resident that someone may be on the property and it encourages burglars to keep moving. It also eliminates much of the light pollution problem. The convict's other suggestion was to get a dog.
I no longer live in a big city. I moved out to the fringes of the suburbs in search of a nice dark sky and some peace and quiet. And except for the coyotes, it is usually pretty quiet. The dark sky, however, can still be elusive.
Like many of the new subdivisions, mine also requires a lamp post to be placed along the driveway. If it's required, I have no problems putting one up; it's something I agreed to when I chose to live here. But don't expect me to turn it on.
My electrician told me that many subdivisions now are working on getting the lamp post to be switchless, meaning that it is constantly on, running day or night. This I have a real problem with. Not only is it a ridiculous waste of money and energy, it's also a real headache for amateur astronomers. I could get into the negative effects that light pollultion has on wildlife, but I'll save that for another day.
If I lived in one of those subdivisions, I'd either have to invest in a bunch of burlap bags to cover the neighborhood lights on nights I wanted to observe, or I'd have to invest in a BB gun. Maybe just a good slingshot would do.
So can I just make a little plea here? If you're not expecting visitors after dark and it's not Halloween evening with trick-or-treaters making their rounds, please leave your exterior lights off! Or at least, if you see your neighbor out there staring up at the sky, with or without a pair of binoculars or a telescope, dim the lights, please. It's a little hard to follow the delicate tendrils of a nebula with your porchlight blaring in their eyes. Better yet, turn off your lights and fumble on over and see what's on the agenda for tonight. When was the last time you saw the dim light of a billion stars shining together that have been racing across space for a couple million years before reaching your eyes here on Earth? Once you've caught a glimpse of that, in your memory it will forever outshine your subdivison-issue lamp post.
