RangerWickett
Legend
And now the rest:
[sblock]My friend Ken Daniel is a lighting designer. About a decade ago, he told me something that changed the way I think about the night. It was early evening, and we were sitting with some other people in an unelectrified barn on Martha’s Vineyard and looking out at the ocean, and he observed that we were doing something that Americans almost never do anymore: watching it get dark. In the early nineteen-nineties, Daniel worked in Los Angeles and he and his family lived in Glendale. His wife, Gina, told me that the street lights and other lights in their neighborhood were so bright that their bedrooms never got fully dark at night, even though they had curtains. When the Northridge earthquake struck, in 1994, the first thing she noticed, after the shaking had awakened her, was that she couldn’t see. “The earthquake had knocked out the power all over the city, and everything was black,” she said. “When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbors standing in the street, looking up at the sky and saying, ‘Wow.’ ”
Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours “in a box, looking at a box,” as Dave Crawford put it: we spend our days inside offices, looking at computer screens, and our evenings inside houses, looking at television screens. Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles—and when we do venture outdoors after dark we are usually just stepping into yet another box, the glowing canopy that our lights have projected into the sky.
The twenty-four-hour day/night cycle, which is also known as the circadian clock, influences physiological processes in virtually all living things. Pervasive artificial illumination has existed for such a brief period that not even the species that invented it has had time to adapt, biologically or otherwise. The most widely discussed human malady related to the disturbance of circadian rhythms is jet lag, but there are others. Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in Farmington, has suggested a link between cancer and the “circadian disruption” of hormones caused by artificial lighting. Early in his career, Stevens was one of many researchers struck by the markedly high incidence of breast cancer among women in the industrialized world, in comparison with those in developing countries, and he at first supported the most common early hypothesis, which was that the cause must be dietary. Yet repeated studies found no clear link to food. In the early eighties, Stevens told me recently, “I literally woke up in the middle of the night—there was a street lamp outside the window, and it was so bright that I could almost read in my bedroom—and I thought, Could it be that?” A few years later, he persuaded the authors of the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest and most rigorous investigations of women’s medical issues ever undertaken, to add questions about nighttime employment, and the study subsequently revealed a strong association between working the night shift and an increased risk of breast cancer. Eva Schernhammer, of the Harvard Medical School, and Karl Schulmeister, an Austrian physicist, analyzed the work-shift data from the Nurses’ Study several years ago, and wrote, “We hypothesize that the potential primary culprit for this observed association is the lack of melatonin, a cancer-protective agent whose production is severely diminished in people exposed to light at night.”
Although nighttime lighting has seldom been a priority of environmentalists—one of whom described it to me recently as a “soft” issue—bad or unnecessary lighting not only wastes billions of dollars’ worth of energy every year but also can wreak havoc on ecosystems. Migrating birds can be fatally “captured” by artificial lights, a fact that was made obvious a half century ago, when early versions of a common meteorological device called a ceilometer—which used a powerful vertical beam of light to measure cloud ceilings—sometimes killed thousands of migrating birds in a single night. Artificial light can be especially lethal to insects. Gerhard Eisenbeis, a German entomologist, has written that outdoor lighting can have a “vacuum cleaner” effect on local insect populations, causing large numbers to be “sucked out of habitat.” An earlier German study showed that new, brightly lit gas stations initially attracted large numbers of insects, but that the numbers fell rapidly after two years, presumably because local populations were decimated. One of the several ways in which light fixtures kill insects is by causing them to rest on the ground or in vegetation, where they become easy prey. In Florida, artificial lights have had a disastrous impact on sea-turtle populations. During the summer and the early fall, hatchlings, which emerge primarily at night from nests on Florida beaches, are often fatally attracted to street lights, house lights, and other sources of unshielded artificial illumination, dying after being drawn into open areas, where they are easily attacked by predators, or onto roads. The problem is that newborn sea turtles instinctively move toward the brightest part of the horizon—which, for millions of years, would have been not shopping malls and beach houses but the night sky over the open sea.
The day after Dave Crawford and I inspected nighttime Tucson, I drove five hundred and fifty miles north to Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah. That evening, I joined about two hundred people, including many children, outside the visitors’ center, where telescopes of various sizes had been set up in the parking lot. Several were equipped with computerized tracking devices, which could be programmed to find and follow interesting objects in the sky. At one station or another, I saw the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter (tiny dots in a line), Saturn (with rings), a dense group of old stars, known as a globular cluster, a pair of twin stars (one blue and one gold), and the mountains and valleys that Galileo saw on the moon. With just my own eyes, I saw the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which rapidly crossed the sky just before eleven o’clock, and, a little later, I saw the meteor-like flash of a passing Iridium satellite.
I spoke with Chad Moore, the program director of the National Park Service’s Night Sky Team. “Many people who come to our programs have never really looked at the night sky,” he told me. “A woman once came up to me and said, ‘The moon was out during the day this morning—is that O.K.?’ ” Moore, who is in his mid-thirties, created the Night Sky Team in 1999. Its mission, he said, is not just to increase interest in stars but also to remind people, including higher-ups in the Park Service, that national parks don’t go away when the sun sets.
Moore and I met back in the same parking lot about three hours later, long after the other stargazers had gone to bed. The moon was going to set at about three-forty-five, and at that point there would be an hour of deep darkness before sunrise. We drove to another parking lot, near the rim of the canyon, and walked up to Sunset Point, one of a series of lookouts linked by a walking path. Moore said that he and his fellow-rangers usually have to urge first-time participants in the park’s nighttime programs to resist turning on flashlights the moment they step out of their cars, and to instead allow their eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. “When the moon is low in the sky like this, there’s about two-thousandths of a foot-candle of light on the ground,” he said, referring to a measure of illumination. (Full sunlight on a clear day has an intensity of about ten thousand foot-candles; nighttime city streets are typically lit to about one and a half foot-candles, seven hundred and fifty times brighter than the moonlit path.) “You and I don’t have supernatural vision,” he continued, “but we’re able to see the path just fine, because our eyes evolved to see in these conditions. I can see individual pebbles on the ground, and if I dropped a quarter I could find it.”
We walked north along the rim trail, on which the setting moon cast long shadows. The canyon’s edge was just a few feet to our right, but I could easily tell where the path ended and the abyss began. The canyon itself was transformed. In bright sunlight, Bryce’s orange-and-white limestone hoodoos, which look a little like enormous drip castles, are so vibrant that they almost shimmer; by night, the formations are virtually monochromatic, like mountains at the bottom of the sea. Nightfall inverts the park: the cliffs draw inward, and the sky becomes almost topographical, a canyon turned upside down.
At last, the moon disappeared below the horizon. I could see, at various compass points, little bulges of sky glow projected by a couple of nearby towns, by one or two more distant cities, and by Ruby’s, the famous, light-encrusted Bryce-area motel and campground, a few miles away, but the sky directly above us was very dark and was filled with stars. I had no trouble seeing the Milky Way, a broad, densely speckled stripe extending across the sky. Moore pointed out the Great Rift, a cluster of dark patches caused by clouds of light-blocking interstellar dust, and the constellation Sagittarius, toward the luminous center of our galaxy. I lay on my back on a bench and watched for meteors, which streaked past every few minutes: in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on. We stayed until we noticed the first glow of the approaching sunrise. Stars near the eastern horizon melted away ahead of it, as though the darkness itself were dissolving.
The next afternoon, Moore and I drove across southern Utah to Natural Bridges National Monument, in the southeastern corner of the state, two hundred and seventy-five miles away. This past March, the I.D.A., relying partly on darkness measurements collected by Moore and his team, selected Natural Bridges as its first International Dark-Sky Park. (Additional sites will be chosen within the next year.) At the time of the designation, Christian Luginbuhl, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory station in Flagstaff, Arizona, and a longtime dark-sky advocate, said, “In plain English, that means it’s the darkest or starriest sky they’ve seen while doing these reviews.”
We arrived at the park just as the summer sky was beginning to deepen, and toured the facilities with Corky Hays, the park’s superintendent. Hays came to Natural Bridges in 2004 partly because her previous Park Service posting, Death Valley, had begun to feel too cosmopolitan to her. “Our buildings were pretty dark already,” she said, “but Chad and his team have helped us make them even darker, by upgrading a lot of our outdoor lighting. That’s let us cut our energy use and operational costs, too, which is important, because the entire park is solar-powered.” Moore pointed out several newly installed full-cutoff light fixtures, and found a few older lights, which still needed to be replaced. He asked for the removal of two of the four tubes in a fluorescent ceiling fixture near some public rest rooms, which are kept open all night and are used by after-dark visitors to the park. “The darker the area, the less light you need,” he said. “People coming here at night will be dark-adapted, so having more light would actually make it harder for them to see when they leave.”
A couple of hours later, after the sun had set completely, Moore and I headed for Owachomo, one of the park’s three natural bridges—which were created, thousands of years ago, by fast-flowing streams that undercut the sandstone walls of their canyons. Owachomo, at its midpoint, rises more than a hundred feet above the canyon floor and is almost two hundred feet across. As we turned a corner on the path, it suddenly loomed before us, a startling black void against a field of stars, like a long, ragged strip torn from the sky. After checking the ground for rattlesnakes (we had encountered one already), Moore and I leaned against some big rocks and simply looked. If I stood still, I could see stars apparently blink off, as the earth’s rotation caused them to be occluded by the sandstone bridge, while, on the other side, others seemed to blink on. The park is so remote that there is little artificial noise, especially at night, and the silence deepened the darkness. Thinking about the incomprehensible distances above us made me remember nights forty years before, when I was twelve years old and lying on my back in a mountain meadow at summer camp in Colorado, watching for shooting stars in what was probably the darkest sky I’ve ever seen, or will ever see.
Moore and I stood like that, not saying much, for more than an hour. Then we returned to the visitors’ center and said goodbye. I drove east to the nearest town, where I hoped to get some sleep before continuing to Salt Lake City and my flight home. Moore, who had brought a sleeping bag, went out into the park to spend the night under the stars.[/sblock]
It looks like the text was just too long for one post. I wonder if this change has anything to do with the conversion to EN World 2.
[sblock]My friend Ken Daniel is a lighting designer. About a decade ago, he told me something that changed the way I think about the night. It was early evening, and we were sitting with some other people in an unelectrified barn on Martha’s Vineyard and looking out at the ocean, and he observed that we were doing something that Americans almost never do anymore: watching it get dark. In the early nineteen-nineties, Daniel worked in Los Angeles and he and his family lived in Glendale. His wife, Gina, told me that the street lights and other lights in their neighborhood were so bright that their bedrooms never got fully dark at night, even though they had curtains. When the Northridge earthquake struck, in 1994, the first thing she noticed, after the shaking had awakened her, was that she couldn’t see. “The earthquake had knocked out the power all over the city, and everything was black,” she said. “When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbors standing in the street, looking up at the sky and saying, ‘Wow.’ ”
Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours “in a box, looking at a box,” as Dave Crawford put it: we spend our days inside offices, looking at computer screens, and our evenings inside houses, looking at television screens. Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles—and when we do venture outdoors after dark we are usually just stepping into yet another box, the glowing canopy that our lights have projected into the sky.
The twenty-four-hour day/night cycle, which is also known as the circadian clock, influences physiological processes in virtually all living things. Pervasive artificial illumination has existed for such a brief period that not even the species that invented it has had time to adapt, biologically or otherwise. The most widely discussed human malady related to the disturbance of circadian rhythms is jet lag, but there are others. Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, in Farmington, has suggested a link between cancer and the “circadian disruption” of hormones caused by artificial lighting. Early in his career, Stevens was one of many researchers struck by the markedly high incidence of breast cancer among women in the industrialized world, in comparison with those in developing countries, and he at first supported the most common early hypothesis, which was that the cause must be dietary. Yet repeated studies found no clear link to food. In the early eighties, Stevens told me recently, “I literally woke up in the middle of the night—there was a street lamp outside the window, and it was so bright that I could almost read in my bedroom—and I thought, Could it be that?” A few years later, he persuaded the authors of the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest and most rigorous investigations of women’s medical issues ever undertaken, to add questions about nighttime employment, and the study subsequently revealed a strong association between working the night shift and an increased risk of breast cancer. Eva Schernhammer, of the Harvard Medical School, and Karl Schulmeister, an Austrian physicist, analyzed the work-shift data from the Nurses’ Study several years ago, and wrote, “We hypothesize that the potential primary culprit for this observed association is the lack of melatonin, a cancer-protective agent whose production is severely diminished in people exposed to light at night.”
Although nighttime lighting has seldom been a priority of environmentalists—one of whom described it to me recently as a “soft” issue—bad or unnecessary lighting not only wastes billions of dollars’ worth of energy every year but also can wreak havoc on ecosystems. Migrating birds can be fatally “captured” by artificial lights, a fact that was made obvious a half century ago, when early versions of a common meteorological device called a ceilometer—which used a powerful vertical beam of light to measure cloud ceilings—sometimes killed thousands of migrating birds in a single night. Artificial light can be especially lethal to insects. Gerhard Eisenbeis, a German entomologist, has written that outdoor lighting can have a “vacuum cleaner” effect on local insect populations, causing large numbers to be “sucked out of habitat.” An earlier German study showed that new, brightly lit gas stations initially attracted large numbers of insects, but that the numbers fell rapidly after two years, presumably because local populations were decimated. One of the several ways in which light fixtures kill insects is by causing them to rest on the ground or in vegetation, where they become easy prey. In Florida, artificial lights have had a disastrous impact on sea-turtle populations. During the summer and the early fall, hatchlings, which emerge primarily at night from nests on Florida beaches, are often fatally attracted to street lights, house lights, and other sources of unshielded artificial illumination, dying after being drawn into open areas, where they are easily attacked by predators, or onto roads. The problem is that newborn sea turtles instinctively move toward the brightest part of the horizon—which, for millions of years, would have been not shopping malls and beach houses but the night sky over the open sea.
The day after Dave Crawford and I inspected nighttime Tucson, I drove five hundred and fifty miles north to Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah. That evening, I joined about two hundred people, including many children, outside the visitors’ center, where telescopes of various sizes had been set up in the parking lot. Several were equipped with computerized tracking devices, which could be programmed to find and follow interesting objects in the sky. At one station or another, I saw the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter (tiny dots in a line), Saturn (with rings), a dense group of old stars, known as a globular cluster, a pair of twin stars (one blue and one gold), and the mountains and valleys that Galileo saw on the moon. With just my own eyes, I saw the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which rapidly crossed the sky just before eleven o’clock, and, a little later, I saw the meteor-like flash of a passing Iridium satellite.
I spoke with Chad Moore, the program director of the National Park Service’s Night Sky Team. “Many people who come to our programs have never really looked at the night sky,” he told me. “A woman once came up to me and said, ‘The moon was out during the day this morning—is that O.K.?’ ” Moore, who is in his mid-thirties, created the Night Sky Team in 1999. Its mission, he said, is not just to increase interest in stars but also to remind people, including higher-ups in the Park Service, that national parks don’t go away when the sun sets.
Moore and I met back in the same parking lot about three hours later, long after the other stargazers had gone to bed. The moon was going to set at about three-forty-five, and at that point there would be an hour of deep darkness before sunrise. We drove to another parking lot, near the rim of the canyon, and walked up to Sunset Point, one of a series of lookouts linked by a walking path. Moore said that he and his fellow-rangers usually have to urge first-time participants in the park’s nighttime programs to resist turning on flashlights the moment they step out of their cars, and to instead allow their eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. “When the moon is low in the sky like this, there’s about two-thousandths of a foot-candle of light on the ground,” he said, referring to a measure of illumination. (Full sunlight on a clear day has an intensity of about ten thousand foot-candles; nighttime city streets are typically lit to about one and a half foot-candles, seven hundred and fifty times brighter than the moonlit path.) “You and I don’t have supernatural vision,” he continued, “but we’re able to see the path just fine, because our eyes evolved to see in these conditions. I can see individual pebbles on the ground, and if I dropped a quarter I could find it.”
We walked north along the rim trail, on which the setting moon cast long shadows. The canyon’s edge was just a few feet to our right, but I could easily tell where the path ended and the abyss began. The canyon itself was transformed. In bright sunlight, Bryce’s orange-and-white limestone hoodoos, which look a little like enormous drip castles, are so vibrant that they almost shimmer; by night, the formations are virtually monochromatic, like mountains at the bottom of the sea. Nightfall inverts the park: the cliffs draw inward, and the sky becomes almost topographical, a canyon turned upside down.
At last, the moon disappeared below the horizon. I could see, at various compass points, little bulges of sky glow projected by a couple of nearby towns, by one or two more distant cities, and by Ruby’s, the famous, light-encrusted Bryce-area motel and campground, a few miles away, but the sky directly above us was very dark and was filled with stars. I had no trouble seeing the Milky Way, a broad, densely speckled stripe extending across the sky. Moore pointed out the Great Rift, a cluster of dark patches caused by clouds of light-blocking interstellar dust, and the constellation Sagittarius, toward the luminous center of our galaxy. I lay on my back on a bench and watched for meteors, which streaked past every few minutes: in a truly dark sky, shooting stars are too numerous to bother wishing on. We stayed until we noticed the first glow of the approaching sunrise. Stars near the eastern horizon melted away ahead of it, as though the darkness itself were dissolving.
The next afternoon, Moore and I drove across southern Utah to Natural Bridges National Monument, in the southeastern corner of the state, two hundred and seventy-five miles away. This past March, the I.D.A., relying partly on darkness measurements collected by Moore and his team, selected Natural Bridges as its first International Dark-Sky Park. (Additional sites will be chosen within the next year.) At the time of the designation, Christian Luginbuhl, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory station in Flagstaff, Arizona, and a longtime dark-sky advocate, said, “In plain English, that means it’s the darkest or starriest sky they’ve seen while doing these reviews.”
We arrived at the park just as the summer sky was beginning to deepen, and toured the facilities with Corky Hays, the park’s superintendent. Hays came to Natural Bridges in 2004 partly because her previous Park Service posting, Death Valley, had begun to feel too cosmopolitan to her. “Our buildings were pretty dark already,” she said, “but Chad and his team have helped us make them even darker, by upgrading a lot of our outdoor lighting. That’s let us cut our energy use and operational costs, too, which is important, because the entire park is solar-powered.” Moore pointed out several newly installed full-cutoff light fixtures, and found a few older lights, which still needed to be replaced. He asked for the removal of two of the four tubes in a fluorescent ceiling fixture near some public rest rooms, which are kept open all night and are used by after-dark visitors to the park. “The darker the area, the less light you need,” he said. “People coming here at night will be dark-adapted, so having more light would actually make it harder for them to see when they leave.”
A couple of hours later, after the sun had set completely, Moore and I headed for Owachomo, one of the park’s three natural bridges—which were created, thousands of years ago, by fast-flowing streams that undercut the sandstone walls of their canyons. Owachomo, at its midpoint, rises more than a hundred feet above the canyon floor and is almost two hundred feet across. As we turned a corner on the path, it suddenly loomed before us, a startling black void against a field of stars, like a long, ragged strip torn from the sky. After checking the ground for rattlesnakes (we had encountered one already), Moore and I leaned against some big rocks and simply looked. If I stood still, I could see stars apparently blink off, as the earth’s rotation caused them to be occluded by the sandstone bridge, while, on the other side, others seemed to blink on. The park is so remote that there is little artificial noise, especially at night, and the silence deepened the darkness. Thinking about the incomprehensible distances above us made me remember nights forty years before, when I was twelve years old and lying on my back in a mountain meadow at summer camp in Colorado, watching for shooting stars in what was probably the darkest sky I’ve ever seen, or will ever see.
Moore and I stood like that, not saying much, for more than an hour. Then we returned to the visitors’ center and said goodbye. I drove east to the nearest town, where I hoped to get some sleep before continuing to Salt Lake City and my flight home. Moore, who had brought a sleeping bag, went out into the park to spend the night under the stars.[/sblock]
It looks like the text was just too long for one post. I wonder if this change has anything to do with the conversion to EN World 2.
