Too bad -- several thousand words about this new, brighter lighting, but no mention of its effect on astronomy, or of the light pollution that keeps city-dwellers from seeing the stars and planets.
First paragraph: Five years ago a bright orange blanket of light used to saturate the city and stain the air above. Today it’s a metropolis aglow with tens of thousands of cool silvery pinpoint lights. The grid is clearer. The skies are blacker.
4th “What was once a most common human experience has become most rare,” writes Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night, a book that assails the world’s unchecked light pollution.
That could have been played up in the article more, to be sure, and I would have liked that, but a well educated reader might recognize the passage below from the article as a reference to that issue.
"Today in the U.S. there are some 60 million of those cobrahead streetlamps blazing pink-peach all night long, heedless of inactivity below and absurdly lighting the sky above. Forty percent of the average city’s electric bill goes to street lighting, and close to half of that is wasted. Excessive outdoor lighting, including exterior fixtures on office and industrial buildings, wastes about $3.5 billion in energy per year, according to the International Dark-Sky Association, a not-for-profit that works to reduce light pollution."
Night sky viewing is sure the first thing I thought of when I read the article, and perhaps it was the first thing you thought of too. Lots of us here on HN are fans of astronomy and space exploration.
I managed to miss them. I searched for astronomy and light pollution, but I missed those references that were actually there for more attentive, patient readers.
