So Come On, Darkness

Sully's been yammering for a few days bout seeing the stars when it's dark enough. That's one thing I miss about down home, how fucking dark it gets without all the artificial lighting like we have here in NYC. The kind of dark where it's possible to have no idea someone is standing five feet in front of you. Seeing taillights across the river slowly move along a bridge a few miles away. Such darkness has always been comforting to me, and I think I get depressed sometimes being in the big city where there's never absolute darkness - that omnipresent pink hue of light drives me fucking bananas. It's like that awful feeling as a kid of going to bed when it's still light outside.- XMASTIME

While light pollution has become an epidemic and it's getting harder and harder to see the same night sky the ancient Greeks did, over at VOX there's hope that we can get our night skies back:

Still, as light pollution becomes a bigger issue, some towns are starting to cut back on excessive lighting.

The best known example to date is in Los Angeles, which is replacing its old bulbous streetlamps that scattered light in every direction with newer, more efficient LEDs that only send light downward. As Ucilia Wang recently illustrated in Forbes, the reduction in glare has been dramatic, and the skies overhead are now noticeably darker. (That said, cities interested in reducing light pollution need to be careful about color selection. Many LEDs largely emit blue light, which brightens the night sky more than any other color.)

There are other lighting technologies cities could adopt, too. "We now have the ability to dim lights in ways that we couldn't before," says Scott Kardel of the International Dark-Sky Association. "And we can even equip streetlights with sensors so that they only turn on when traffic or people are nearby."
Kardel notes that more and more cities are taking a closer look at these technologies — although it's usually done to save money, and not necessarily to bring back the night sky.