Night sky brings town an air of distinction

[bananas]

Night sky brings town an air of distinction
By Bruce Lieberman
Union-Tribune Staff Writer

2:00 a.m. August 5, 2009

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On Friday, a group called the International Dark-Sky Association named Borrego Springs an International Dark Sky Community. Only one other town, Flagstaff, Ariz., has received the distinction.

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“We are this dark gem in the center,” said Dennis Mammana, an astronomy lecturer, author and freelance columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune who lives in Borrego Springs and helped lead the effort to get the designation.

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Residents began the campaign for the designation nearly two years ago, holding several educational meetings and surveying businesses and institutions that were open to modifying lights to keep the skies dark.

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Hotels, resorts and RV parks are also attentive to lighting on their grounds and promote stargazing. Dan Wright, who owns The Springs at Borrego, an RV resort with a golf course and swimming pools, has built a small observatory that houses an 11-inch-diameter telescope. The RV resort hosts seven star parties every year.

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[snagglepuss]

1. thanks for posting. Never heard of the group. I love that communities are curbing

light pollution and that there's a group to recognize those efforts.

[girl gone mad]

2. Curbing light pollution is an effort I worked on a lot back in college..

I found that local businesses were usually very receptive. Homeowners were harder to reach.

I would love it if the administration took light pollution seriously and added it to their greening America efforts. So much energy is wasted with muti-directional street lights and porch lighting left on all night, etc. People have forgotten what the night skies used to look like. Even in my lifetime, I've seen a big difference.

WTG, Borrego Springs.

[HamdenRice]

3. To me, the big problem is sodium vapor street lights

I remember being able to see millions of stars even in the outer boroughs of New York. As a child in Brooklyn, we used to watch sputnik and other satellites cross the sky. This was despite household light and street lights.

Sometime around the late 1960s, the city began replacing regular street lights with sodium vapor lights. I don't know why, but that orangish light obliterates the sky much more than other light.

My grandmother had a farm in a remote area, and in the summer we used to look at the billions of stars, the milky way and satellites. Then the town of Farmville, about 15 miles away got sodium vapor lights, and there was this orange glow on the horizon that obliterated the night sky even from that distance.

A big first step would be just to convince municipalities to get rid of sodium vapor lights.

[cilla4progress]

4. Perfect timing!

The perseid shower over the next week this year is supposed to be superlative!

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

5. Joshua Tree (CA) has dark sky requirements

A new car dealership had to replace all the lights on its lot because they weren't designed to block extraneous light.

Unfortunately, the deep black star-filled sky we enjoyed in 1990 is gone, due to (1) L.A.'s smog finally reaching us, (2) the plethora of billboards with lights facing skyward which line I-10 on the south side of the National Park and (3) the unregulated lights in communities to the south, west and north of the town and park. Once the air was so clear the stars took your breath away, they were so bright and there were so many of them. Now we're lucky if we catch a glimpse of the Milky Way.

Borrego Springs is about 50 miles south of here; I hope they're able to avoid our fate.