Dark Skies Utah's Treasure

This is the season for stargazing. In December and January, the winter skies are cold and - sometimes - clear. A cloudless night reveals a bright canopy of stars, so it is the perfect time to get out your telescope or binoculars.

It also happens to be the time when astronomy is celebrated in the Christmas story. The magi, three wise men from Persia, followed a star to Bethlehem. Our connection with the stars is recorded in every culture

Van Gogh was enthralled with night, as he wrote to his brother Theo that same year: "It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day....The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously."

In which he not only conquered the difficulties of using color to depict darkness but also went a long way toward capturing the spiritual and symbolic meanings that he saw in the night.

Today cities shine, suburbs twinkle, and the few remaining locales that don't glow with electricity look both desolate and peaceful. Despite our love of light, so-called light pollution can have detrimental effects to wildlife and humans. That's why organizations and individuals are focused on preserving the night, protecting wildlife, and conserving electricity, have begun to identify dark sky reserves across the world.

Below are two photographs: on the left, a shot of the night skies in a major city. On the right, a shot of the Arizona desert shows the beauty and color of the night sky. The Yellow glow in the under the bottom right corner of the tree is light pollution from a small town 30 miles away.

If you squint real hard you can make out one, maybe two stars in the photo on the left. On the right there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, with millions more casting their unearthly glow through the gas and dust clouds of our own Milky Way galaxy - the streak of nebulous light traversing the photo diagonally.

In densely populated areas like the East Coast, you need to travel hundreds of miles before you reach truly unpolluted skies. Because so much of what we can see from space is incredibly faint, at the edge of human perception, the effect of even a small amount of ambient light on the night sky can be dramatic. Nearly 80 percent of people living in North America are unable to see the Milky Way from where they live, according to a 2016 study that mapped the extent of global light pollution.

Torrey • Utah is emerging as a global leader in protecting dark skies from light pollution, attracting visits to the Colorado Plateau that during the next decade are expected to pump $2.5 billion into rural economies.

Residents in several southern Utah communities have mounted a grass-roots push to retrofit old lighting outside homes, business and public thoroughfares to curb stray beams and save money through more efficient, directed lighting.

Torrey, the gateway town to Capitol Reef National Park, is slated to become the state's first Dark Sky Community, while Springdale, Boulder, Moab, Kanab and the border town of Page, Ariz., are considering or have passed light-curbing ordinances. The Dark Sky Community designation is an award granted so far to only 15 other communities in the United States, Canada, Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands.

The situation could become worse. According to the new study, if all sodium lights are replaced with cool white LED lighting, artificial sky brightness seen across Europe could more than double as a result of the increase in blue-light emission. Possible alternate measures are the use of more shielded street lighting, motion-activated lights and cut-off times for illuminating buildings. Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, agrees, "It will reduce our electricity bills, it will reduce our carbon footprint, it won't affect the lighting that we have on the streets," he said. "And it will allow us to see more of the wonders of the night sky."

We are here on planet Earth but we live in a huge cosmos, and its one of the things that links us to our position in the universe. And so it is wonderful to see it. I think by looking up at the stars we have endeavoured to do so many things, we've sent probes to Pluto and beyond, and if we lose contact with that I think we lose some of our ability to dream and to aspire. It starts with the Milky Way but where will it end?

"The Stars are the Jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything

that the day has to show" - Henry David Thoreau