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Leo Simpson, B.Bus.
Editor
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ISSN 1030-2662
2
SILICON CHIP
Light pollution wastes energy
The subject of this month's "Publisher's Letter" was triggered by one of the
projects featured in this issue, the Infrared Night Viewer. Naturally, as part of the
work involved in presenting this unit, we used it at night. And while it is more
effective if used with an infrared torch, it does work quite well on moonlit
nights. Interestingly, it can also work quite well on cloudy nights when the
Moon is completely blocked out. How can this be so?
First of all, if you live in any Australian city or major town, it no longer gets
really dark at night. There is so much light around at night that we now have a
major new form of pollution to contend with - light pollution. And it is the
infrared portion of all this light that enables the aforesaid infrared night viewer
to work. But this is not good.
Most Australians, unless they have an interest in astronomy, could not give a
fig about light pollution. It is now so bad in Australian cities that many city
residents cannot even see, let alone identify, the symbol on our flag, the
Southern Cross. Yet the Southern Cross is one of the brightest constellations in
our skies. And nor should light pollution be thought of as a problem just in the
inner city areas. It is particularly bad in the newer suburbs which have very
bright street lighting, where the houses have so-called security lighting, plus
lighting for the pool, barbecue and garden. And there is the super bright lighting
used for sporting venues, shopping centres, car sales yards and so on.
Maybe most people don't care whether they can see stars in the sky or not.
Maybe most of them are afraid of the dark. But the level of lighting now being
employed is downright wasteful. It costs a lot of money to install all that lighting
and it takes a lot of energy to run it. Not only is it over-bright, most of the lighting
fixtures are badly designed and aim a good portion of their light straight up into
the sky instead of down at the ground. In fact, driving along roads near nighttime sporting venues can often be unpleasant because there is so much glare
from the lighting.
It is about time we came to our senses about this subject. While we may regard
countries such as the USA as being very wasteful of energy, when it comes to
light pollution we are right up there at the top of the list. In the USA and other
countries , there is an organisation called the "International Dark Sky Association" and this has had considerable success in mitigating this problem. It is
probably about time we had a branch of this organisation in Australia. If we start
now, we could save a huge amount of fossil fuel and maybe children of the
future will be able to see the stars at night, perhaps even more than we can now.
If you want to write to the International Dark Sky Association, their address
is: 3545 North Stewart, Tucson, Arizona 85716, USA.
Leo Simpson
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