Cities and towns mark boundaries in the American West Equipped with signage to provide visitors with information deemed most pertinent. Often it’s elevation and founding date, not population. Thus, Tombstone, Arizona, home of Wyatt Earp and where the OK Ranch shootout took place, welcomes visitors with the words “Elevation 4339. Founded 1879.”

Flagstaff, Arizona is different. Yes, tell everyone this city is at an altitude of 6906 feet (2105 meters) and was founded in 1882. However, a further sentence is added, “the world’s first international dark sky city”.

This designation represents a quest that Flagstaff has been undertaking for 65 years. That is, even though business is thriving and the city’s population has quadrupled his size, it remains a city where you can look up to the sky and see the Milky Way. This is unusual. Because in most parts of the world, the night sky is increasingly eroded by the glare of street lights, football lights, security lights, and anything else that causes light to escape upwards.

At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, astronomer James Lowenthal of Smith College in Massachusetts said until recently, astronomers said the problem was about 2 percent per year. He pointed out that he thought it was getting worse at a rate. However, in January of this year paper A paper published in Science showed that this trend has accelerated fivefold thanks to the rapid increase in the use of ultra-bright LED lighting. This is equivalent to doubling the brightness of the sky every 8 years. “This means that within 10 years, thousands of stars could be lost from the sky every day, at a rate of about one a day, over most parts of the United States,” Rowen said. Tarr says.

Not so for Flagstaff. In 1958, the first outdoor lighting ordinance was passed. The ordinance was primarily intended to ban the use of searchlights in advertising, but has since been updated repeatedly. Currently, commercial developments and residential areas limit the amount of light. Sets the standard for the preferred color spectrum of the lighting (blue is bad). Refurbish street lamps. Where possible, the light should be fully or partially occluded so that it reaches only where it is needed. There’s also the novel concept of “light trespassing,” according to Daniel Folke, the city’s director of community development, who says my lights should stay on my property and not enter your property. .

And it has teeth. “Basically, we can bring someone to the hearing and cite their critiques if necessary,” said former Flagstaff Dark Sky Compliance Officer Mark Stent. Surrounding counties are now doing the same. Similar lighting code. But that’s a last resort, he points out. He prefers to work through building permits and public assistance rather than courts, especially for private homes. “I don’t want to knock on your door in the middle of the night and tell you to turn off the lights,” he says.

All of this may sound a little arrogant, but the reality is that there is overwhelming buy-in from the community. Flagstaff has Dark Sky Brewing Company (which advertises its craft beer as “as unique and beautiful as every star, meteor, and comet you see from your backyard”), a coffee shop serving Dark Sky Lattes, and Dark Some roads are called sky lanes. .

“It’s never a hassle,” says Kim Conley, a two-time Olympic track and field athlete and one of many elite athletes and other location-based mobile professionals who have chosen the city to be their home. says Mr. “Flagstaff is very proud to be a city of dark skies.”

Much of its driving force comes from the city’s history. Flagstaff is home to the Lowell Observatory, where 120 years ago Percival his Lowell sketched a map of Mars, and decades later Clyde his Tombaugh discovered Pluto. It has since been joined by the United States Naval Observatory, which operates just eight kilometers west of the city. Flagstaff is a city where stars are built into her DNA.

Today, it’s no longer the only international Dark Sky City, but it’s still one of the most prominent, so much so that AAS conferences devote four and a half hours of ‘in-conference meetings’ to lessons learned from its success.

Lowenthal says it’s most important to realize that light pollution isn’t just a problem for cities with strong ties to observatories. “We astronomers are like canaries in a coal mine,” he says, but light pollution affects many other things. “Most life on Earth has evolved to have a 24-hour light-dark cycle,” he says. Light pollution destroys it easily.

Folke points out that “turtle lighting” is a big problem in Florida. So turtles don’t need light, but beach communities need to be dark enough to avoid newly hatched sea turtles becoming disoriented and unsafely moving towards the lights. Thing. Sea.

Light pollution can also affect human health. Lowell Observatory executive director Jeffrey Hall said that over several years, 300,000 randomly selected people were asked to respond to regular surveys about their health and lifestyle. said to be participating in In 2018, “there was an entirely new section asking about daily light exposure, apparently in response to the medical community’s growing awareness of the degenerative effects of the natural light-dark cycle.”

Forke, meanwhile, stresses the need to look for win-win solutions, many of which are outdoor lighting developed by the Society of Lighting Engineers, which astronomers once might have considered “our enemy.” He suggests that following the five principles of

The principle is simple, common sense and energy efficient. Nighttime lighting should be purposeful, not brighter than necessary, shine only where needed, turn off when not needed, and use as little blue light as possible. “Who would object to this?” Folke asks.

It’s also important to convince people that they don’t need bright spotlights everywhere to be safe. “I think that’s probably the biggest challenge we face,” Forke says. “The police department never came to us and said we needed more lights.

But addressing these issues will require astronomers and other scientists to jump out of the ivory tower and into politics, Hall added. But he says it’s not as bad as it sounds. Because even in today’s politically divided climate, most legislators are more likely to cooperate once they are out of the spotlight of the partisan media. “By and large, they [are] I’m really trying to find an answer,” he says.

However, he admits that sometimes they may have picked up some strange misinformation. He said when he was working on a bill to reduce light pollution around another observatory in Arizona, Kitt Peak, southwest of Tucson, one lawmaker said the 11 p.m. He suggested that a ban would suffice. At Kitt Peak, I remembered the tour guide’s words that astronomers don’t start observing until midnight. “I highly doubt Kit Peak’s tour guide said that, but that’s what it sounded like,” says Hall.

Bottom line: Reclaiming the night sky isn’t going to happen all at once. As long as that happens, it will be one small community at a time, with a lot of one-on-one engagement.

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