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Driving home from Sedona and noticed something weird about the sky
I was coming back from a job near Flagstaff last month and pulled over near Oak Creek Canyon around 10pm. The sky was so clear you could see the Milky Way just pouring across, but what really got me was how different it looked compared to when I was a kid. Back then, you could see that same river of stars even out in the suburbs, not just way out in the desert. Has anyone else noticed how much light pollution has crept into places that used to be dark?
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kai_burns7312d ago
Maybe it's just me but I feel like people romanticize the past a little too much when it comes to this stuff. I grew up near Phoenix and even as a kid in the 90s you had to drive way out past Cave Creek to get truly dark skies. Sedona and Flagstaff have actually gotten better about light ordinances in the last 20 years if anything. The real problem isn't that light pollution is spreading into new places, it's that everyone just moved into the desert and built houses everywhere. There's more people in Arizona now than there were kids around when we were growing up and all those people need lights at night.
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the_eric12d ago
Oh man you're totally right about the blue-white LEDs! I actually read somewhere that those things are way worse for dark skies than the old sodium lights because they scatter more in the atmosphere. There was this study out of Tucson that showed even with stricter rules the shift to LED streetlights actually made light pollution worse in some areas. It's like we solved one problem but created another just as bad. And yeah the population thing is huge, I grew up in California and watched the same thing happen there with the Central Valley. All those people moving in need homes and lights and roads and it just adds up. The romanticizing thing is tricky because yeah the past wasn't perfect but the pace of change now is genuinely different than what our parents saw.
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Ask @kai_burns73 if he thinks the stricter light ordinances in Flagstaff actually matter when every new development coming in has those stupid bright blue-white LEDs that wreck night vision way worse than old yellow lights ever did. Like is it even worth passing rules if nobody follows the spirit of them
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