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Topic subjectRE: More than my plate can handle !!!!!
Topic URLhttp://www.pcqanda.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=4&topic_id=140443&mesg_id=140473
140473, RE: More than my plate can handle !!!!!
Posted by Shelly, Tue Oct-02-07 03:50 PM
It's a very old problem. It's not just light pollution either, it is atmospheric industrial pollution.

The Royal Greenwich Observatory near London, responsible for our Prime Meridian astronomical time reference is today about useless. Fortunately, we now depend on atomic clocks. Once far from the lights of London, the growth of the city has brought light pollution there.

The same is true for the old Naval Observatory in Washington DC, which has been converted into the home of the vice President.

Mount Wilson with its 100 inch telescope, and Mount Palomar with its 200 inch telescope are suffering from light pollution caused by California's population growth.

In New York City, only the Sun and the Moon are visible in the sky.

I have seen great changes in my life long amateur astronomy work. In Jacksonville I have to travel with my telescope about 30 miles to the Great Okefenokee Swamp to find dark skies for any serious observation, sharing my night with alligators and snakes.

Much of the light pollution is caused by inefficient street lighting, and parking lot lighting which sends its light upward as well as down.

I remember even 30 years ago during visits to the Florida Keys, seeing brilliant night skies, a very visible Milky Way spilling from horizon to horizon. It was like being on a ship in mid ocean. I could read by the starlight. Now, even that paradise, has been reached by air pollution then unheard of, dimming the stars.

The problem is not so much for astronomy. We have been building new observatories far from civilization all over the world with instruments we could not have dreamed of 50 years ago. the Hubble Space Telescope will be replaced by a much larger one in orbit, in 2013. Soon we will be building a huge observatory on the far side of the Moon that always faces away from Earth.

What bothers me are the generations of children who will live their entire lives without ever seeing the grandeur and beauty of the universe with their own eyes. If that fails to move anyone, they have no soul.