Simple streetlight hack could protect astronomy from urban light pollution
Simple streetlight hack could protect astronomy from urban light pollution
The spread of light pollution is so fast that it offsets improvements achieved through advances in telescope technology.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
"simple" = get every light in a city to blink at the same time at the same rate.
Lol i currently have "distributed systems" as a uni class. Yeah just about gives me enough understanding of much of a pain this would be. Apart from the amount of money this would cost.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky.
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) consume only about 10% of the electricity required by traditional incandescent lights and last up to 25 times longer, so it's no surprise that they have become commonplace over the past two decades.
When an entire city gets fitted with energy-saving LED lamps, this bright light scatters through Earth's atmosphere and makes the sky glow with greater intensity.
In fact, the light pollution problem is worsening so fast that it offsets some of the improvements gained through advancements in telescope technology.
"Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles].
The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%.
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not a good summary