Light Pollution: I Hate You

Drive 3 hours east of Los Angeles and you can still see the overwhelming glow of LA and its seemingly endless sprawl of suburbia. This short exposure captures the incessant light that too many people believe we need all throughout the night and the wee hours of the morning. The truth of the matter is that artificial light at night is mostly unnecessary, is damaging, and is worsening. It impacts human health as well as the health of other species. It's wasteful of electricity, and it does little to thwart crime.

Orion setting over the amber glow of southern California

And on a less tangible level, it distances us from our evolutionary roots. For all of human history, we've had a connection to the night sky. We gazed at it, wondered about it, described it, and have come to understand many of its mysteries... only to wipe it from our heritage and from our collective memory over the course of just a few decades. Now we gawk at photos of the night sky because it's such a rare and odd site to so many of us.

So get out there. Go see the night sky and connect.

Read up on it a little:
http://physics.fau.edu/observatory/lightpol-environ.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627884/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0417_030417_tvlightpollution.html

http://www.globeatnight.org/light-pollution.php

http://www.darksky.org/assets/documents/ida_wildlife_brochure.pdf