Night skies

[la_marquise]

One of the things I really like and enjoy about living next to the air field is the amount of sky we have. Both to the non-semi side of the house and to the back, the sky stretches out and out, uninterrupted across the flat land. It's what reconciled me -- the midlander -- to the flat fens: as Dodie Smith said, the flatness gives the sky a chance. And because we're a cul-de-sac and because our house is set away from the road, our nearest street light is quite a few yards away (and to the front and semi-detached side). On cold nights, like the string we've had lately, we have mile upon mile of crisp stars to gaze upon. I'm no good with constellations -- I stop at the Plough and Orion and Cassiopeia, by and large, but there are nights when you can count pleiades and shooting stars or hunt for the fuzz of nebulas.
I shall miss my night sky when the council carry through their threat to build over the airfield with homes for yet more London commuters. I have never been a whole-hearted supporter of the clear skies movement: I've lived in too many badly lit areas with high concentrations of female students to be wholly sanguine about the safety of the dark. But I love the silence of the night-time starfield, with its false memories of the Enterprise and Serenity and Lazarus Long.

Comments

[eleyan.livejournal.com]

That is very evocative. I can remember as a child lying on the back lawn on summer evenings. Tasmania -- 40 years ago, at least -- had very clear skies and relatively low light pollution. And we had the Southern Cross. If you lay there long enough, you would eventually feel as if you were looking down, not up, as if you could fall down into the Milky Way.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I would love to see the Southern Cross. Maybe one day.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Sky-friendly lighting doesn't have to mean an absence of lighting. The problem is not light per se, but light that goes up rather than down. Poorly-designed lights waste energy by allowing light to escape upwards, where it isn't illuminating anything and just causes light pollution. The Campaign for Dark Skies (note - not the Campaign for Dark Streets!) has a lot more useful information about this.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I knew someone would say this :-) I appreciate that the Dark Skies people aren't advocating lack of lighting altogether. The problem is that good quality shielded lighting is expensive and councils often can't afford it. So what happens is one gets more widely spaced low quality lights with shielding which does not address the safety issues. (Wide-spaced shielded sodium lights -- which are appearing near us -- are pretty poor and they worry my mainly elderly neighbours hugely.) The councils are reducing light pollution, but on the cheap and the result is reduced lighting for pedestrians. And that is why I'm not whole-hearted about the Dark Skies movement: we need both issues to be addressed properly.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Next time we come up to visit you, remind us to bring the telescope.