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Light Pollution

Our Vanishing Night Sky

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.

If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.

For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow....

Click here to read the rest of this article by Verlyn Klinkenborg:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text

John Day's Sky Photography Tips

This essay is written in response to requests for tips on how to 

go about photographing clouds and cloudscapes.

Clouds reside in the Near Sky, the lowest 5 0,000 ft. of the atmosphere. That is in contrast to the distant stars in the Far Sky. Photographing merely involves seeing through the lens of a camera. Seeing has many different dimensions. There is generalized seeing with very little focus of attention to that being seen. In this case the Near Sky is like visual Musak, seen but not seen. The clouds have always been there and you pay little attention to them.


At the other end of the attention continuum, there is seeing not only with the physical eye, but also with the inner eye, the eye of the artist innate in each individual but untouched and uncultivated in most. Here, each cloudscape is unique and worth savoring. Some cloudscapes, or clouds, feature such an array of color and arrangement of form that the result is beauty beyond description.


Each photographer of the Near Sky faces the challenge of capturing fleeting images for future reference either of a technical or artistic nature.


The following guidelines, if followed, will enable you to improve the quality of the images you capture.

• At the top of the list, keep your camera rock-solid when you press the shutter release. If possible, use a tripod ,or rest the camera against some solid object. Practice holding the camera firmly and moving only the finger that activates the shutter release. Use of fast ASA film will minimize this problem

• Use a haze or sky filter continuously.

• Use a polarizing filter continuously. Using this filter increases the contrast between clouds, particularly in the cumulus family, and the background sky, thus enhancing the cloud image. Polarized light maximizes at 90 degrees to the solar beam, as you will find by pointing the camera to various parts of the sky. Most point and shoot cameras will not accommodate screw -on filters. However, all is not lost. It is not difficult to hold a filter in front of the lens, rotating it to produce the desired effect and taking care not to allow the stray finger to impinge on the incoming light.

• Use a neutral density filter as demanded by situations in which a bright sky and dark foreground are juxtaposed.

• Become aware of the subtleties of light. In general, avoid photographing in the harsh light of the middle of the day. There is more drama in the light of the low sun of morning and late afternoon.

• Learn the art of composition. The artistic value of a cloudscape often is determined by the arrangement of the various elements that comprise the final image. Intrusive foreground material like bushes, trees , light wires and poles should be eliminated as a first step in composition. Tree branches sometimes come in handy as frames for a photograph.

• Most cameras used by amateurs and semi pros include an automatic focus capability that is activated by an infrared beam. If you have the ability to set the f-stop, you can decide on the depth of focus you want in order to enhance or obscure particular elements in the scene you are shooting. Fortunately this is only a minor consideration when shooting cloud images.

• When photographing a halo or corona around the sun, find some object with which to block out the solar disc. Never look through the viewfinder directly at the sun. Overlooking this precaution could result in eye damage.

• Always remember that clouds are ephemeral, always changing, disappearing into invisible vapor, and reappearing in visible form. This is Nature's "now you see it; now you don't" magic act. So click and catch the moment. Remember that film is cheap compared to the lasting value of a particular scene.

• There are several brands of excellent quality film now on the market, led by Kodak, Fuji and Agfa. A wide range of film speeds is likewise available. ASA 200 is a good choice for most photographers of the sky.

• Hone your skills by practicing, and stopping to think before you click. Is your inner eye awake?

• Study cloudscapes taken by master photographers like Ansel Adams. Try to think as an Adams. Who knows, you may have the potential to become another master photographer of the Near Sky.

• It doesn't happen frequently, but when it does happen it can cause acute embarrassment. Cameras use batteries. Batteries do die. Fortunate is the photographer who has a spare when the need arises.

Good luck!
-John A. Day


This article is copyrighted


click here for more cloud photos by John Day:
http://www.cloudman.com/gallery1_1.html

Look to the Sky

By Jack Borden

Published Orion Afield, v3, no.2, Spring 1999

Have you ever been to Arlington, Massachusetts-just north of Cambridge? It; not exactly Montana, but the buildings in the center of town are low, the streets are wide, and you can actu~y see quite a bit of sky. Just past noon on a sparkling mid-June day almost two decades ago, big, pufty clouds scooted west to east across a deep-blue background. Working as a TV news reporter with microphone in hand, I stopped 20 people in a row put my band over their eyes, visor-style, and asked, "How would you describe the present appearance of the sky?"

Not one of them gave an accurate description. A typical response:

"It’s sunny"

"Any clouds?" I asked.

"There might be:'

When I removed my hand each person was surprised to discover that indeed, they hadn't had the slightest idea what the sky looked like!

We only had time to put six responses on the evening news, but this unusual feature brought many calls and letters. Most viewers said that the feature turned them on to the sky-from that day on they were "sky aware.” A number of them were teachers. Filled with excitement by their discovery of the freely available spectacle above, they turned their students on to the sky and were amazed at how it improved scholarship. I quickly came to see that increasing sky awareness could have a profound effect on education, so I left reporting and started For Spacious Skies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inducing an ongoing conscious awareness of the sky.

The sky is omnipresent. It’s wherever you are. It’s in the Bronx or the High Sierra. It’s available to everyone. Taking students outside and asking them to look at the sky is something any teacher can do. And it yields benefits. In I986, a Harvard study of sky-based learning proved that "sky-aware" students surpass "non-sky" students in several areas of learning, including music appreciation, literary skills, and visual arts skills.

Miriam Kronish, the principal at Eliot Elementary School in Needham. Massachusetts, has been a For Spacious Skies proponent for years. As a first step toward sky-based learning, she suggests drawing the shades and asking Students to tell you what the sky looks like that day. Most students won't remember, so after a few minutes you take them outside and let them take a good look. Then you really begin to talk about it or ask them to write about it.

Of using the program with his fourth grade students, Steve Fortin said, “One of my key goals is to have the kids realize that school is just not four walls.. .that we can branch out and open up the classroom to nature and the environment around us:” His classes did weather study wrote sky poems, did sky-based math and art—they even baked sky cookies! As they become increasingly sky-aware, Steve’s students will grow to confirm Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that the sky is the ultimate art gallery just above. They will, in effect, become benignly incarcerated in the outdoor equivalent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surrounded by an ever-changing work of art and attuned to its aesthetic qualities, would such students ever toss Dunkin' Donuts cups on the ground? Unlikely. They'd be more inclined to develop feelings of protectiveness about the environment.

Already in close to 50,000 homes and classrooms, For Spacious Skies is now going forth as a component of two increasingly well-known education programs. The first is The Weather Channel’s Look Up!, a cross-curricular approach to weather education that emphasizes sky exploration. Look Up! will soon be linked with the Polaroid Education Program. connecting sky-based lessons and activities with the use of instant photography and adding a prospective 700,000 new teachers to the sky-awareness education movement.

The English philosopher John Moffitt said, "To know a thing well we must look at it a long time:' So it is with the sky. Look at it often and long and you will grow to appreciate it more and more. Help a person. young or old, learn to visually ingest the world, to use their eves like wide-angle lenses, and they too, will discover the sky

Jack Borden’s self-avowed mission is turning as many people as possible on to the sky



This article originally appeared in
Orion Afield,
195 Main Street,
Great Barrington, MA 01230,
888/909-6568,
($30/year for 8 issues; 4 each of Orion and Orion Afield).
This article is copywritten material
Any requests for reprinting this article must be made to Orion Afield

Pointing out the subtleties of the sky

Photo © Jerry Howard