Kodos to David et al. for stressing that while dark-sky retirement communities are a neat fringe movement, it’s more important to reduce light pollution where average people live.

I just flew back from Tucson, AZ where I had an observing run @ Kitt Peak National Observatory. Tucson’s population is half a mil, but you wouldn’t know it standing on Kitt Peak, only 55 miles away, where I enjoyed dark skies, the summer Milky Way, and 2 nights of data-taking scientific happiness. How is this possible?

Here’s the answer. Take any flight into Tucson at night. You’ll descend over streets evenly lit by regular sodium circles. The city is well-lighted. So what’s different from other cities? Then you figure it out. No lights glare UP, at you in the plane. Street-lights aim DOWN, at the road, and wear hats to stop light from traveling upward. Ditto for billboard lights (aimed down, not up). Car dealerships are lighted, but not blindingly. Tucson has lights. They’re just intelligently placed. They save energy, energy, & dark skies.

As a result, the countryside 5 miles outside of Tucson, AZ, is far, far darker darker than 5 miles outside my home-town of 10,000. SMART lighting, that’s the ticket. And the solution is for ordinary people to get their town councils to adopt lighting ordinances that prevent waste and reduce light pollution. Check out the noble people at http://www.darksky.org/

If you have an interest in this vision, please join the DarkSkyCommunities group on Yahoo!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DarkSkyCommunities/

Thank you,

David Oesper
Moderator, DarkSkyCommunities
Dodgeville, Wisconsin

It was, I must say, only *barely* 6th (5.6, if I remember correctly, from an AAVSO chart I was using at the time). So don’t read too much into it — I still need to get a few miles out of town to make galaxy viewing especially worthwhile.

Anybody need a network admin/general computer guru in Bouder?

I live in Longmont (about 15 miles northeast of Boulder and 35 miles from Denver). The skies here are actually pretty good if it’s clear (I’ve occasionally *just barely* seen sixth magnitude stars without a scope). I’ve lived in some similarly-sized cities in the eastern United States and the skies here are much better overall.

I can imagine a few astronomers spending a long weekend there and deciding that they had their retirement life style down pat. Some people retire to golf courses. Some like those hamlets with a runway down the middle. Some like a dark night sky and telescopes.

Personally, I’m glad to see this as a developing trend. You don’t expect to do much visible light astronomy from street level at Times Square, but it’s nice to know that there are some places where the night sky is valued.

“Movin too Montana soon…”