Luminous Nights ran two workshops at Leighton Moss RSPB on the 2nd and 3rd of March. Details can be found here. Below is a short description of the event by astronomer Hannah Dalgleish.
Dark skies luminous nights
It was wet and dreary outside but the participants arrived eager and excited to learn about dark skies, in the beautiful setting of Leighton Moss RSPB. There was a mix of around 12 people, some local, some international, some retired, some University staff, some civil servants. We began the workshop with a few dark sky related icebreakers. First, we asked everyone a few simple questions, asking them to stand in different places around the room:
- Have you heard of the term light pollution before – how much do you know about it? (Most people knew a little)
- Do you think that light pollution is a serious issue? (Most people felt it was serious)
- How much light pollution is there where you live? (Most people live in urban/suburban environments)
- What’s the darkest sky you’ve ever experienced? (There was a wide distribution, from the Milky Way to a few stars)
We then invited the participants to talk to the people next to them, and share if they have ever gone on a walk in the dark in nature before, without a torch. I overheard some very interesting stories: one person recounted how they found themselves stuck up a mountain much later than planned, near a cliff edge without any torch, and filled with fear, desperately hoping that they could find the path and the way home in safety.
Now that the ice had been broken, Hannah began the first talk of the workshop with one of the most extreme examples of light pollution in the world: Las Vegas. She showed a photograph that was taken in Death Valley – 90 miles away from the city – showing a great brightening of the sky (aka sky glow) caused by the Las Vegas lights. She showed a few more images, each one taken a little bit closer the city, showing the light pollution and its sources in more and more detail. Eventually, in the last image you can see the Luxor hotel, which emanates a pillar of light so bright – as bright as 42,000 lighthouses – that it has created its own ecosystem of moths, bats, owls, and sometimes, locusts.
In the rest of the presentation, Hannah talked about the history of public lighting, to give a sense of just how difficult, and often dangerous, it was to light up roads and passageways at night before the advent of electricity. The talk then covers some of the latest data about the current state of artificial light at night, and also how challenging it is to gather this data and monitor the rate at which light pollution is increasing, as well as its impact. The environmental impacts are many, disrupting the behaviours and cycles of all living things, including the European eel, a critically endangered and local species to Leighton Moss. The talk concluded with some discussion around how to mitigate light pollution, in different contexts (technological, societal, and political), with some final reflections on losing our cultural night sky heritage and some of the wider implications of luminous nights on humanity now and in the future.
The next talk was given by Rupert, who shared his work on sensing the night. Rupert uses a variety of sensors to record how different physical qualities – such as light, sound, or air – change across daily, monthly, and even yearly cycles. By exploring time to illustrate these human-altered environments, we can improve our understanding of human-nature relationships in a more tangible way. The presentation was provocative, and included comparisons between data taken from Leighton Moss and from the Botanical Gardens in Bonn where the differences in artificial light at night are stark.
After a quick break, Kath McDonald led a session on working with clay. Everyone was given two small blocks of clay, and Kath invited us all to close our eyes as we worked with the first piece. We were encouraged to let our hands move the clay in any way they wanted, rather than letting our heads take the lead. It was a new experience for many, and most people felt that it was a calming and meditative process. Some noted the pleasures of working in the dark to allow other senses to be experienced more vividly, or the interesting change in dynamic when the mind is less in control. For the second piece of clay, we were asked to occasionally open our eyes, to see if what we were making with our hands was aligned with our mind’s eye, and to explore how our approach to construction changes with sight.
At 6pm it was beginning to get dark, and time for the night walk to commence. We invited people to walk in silence, to allow for a heightening of the other senses. We walked up the 9 metre skytower, where we could observe the distant lights emanating from the towns and roads and sky getting brighter as the night got darker. We listened to the amazing booming calls of the bittern, as we walked down to the Tim Jackson hide. In darkness, we watched, waited, and listened some more. It was very noticeable how much of an effect the weather had on the light. On the night of the first workshop it was grey and gloomy with rain – it was much easier to see the artificial light from the cars and street lights. Whereas on the second night, which was bright and clear, it took much longer for darkness to descend and for the light pollution to be visible.
Throughout the event, it was a delight to hear stories and experiences from the participants. One was a local planner, who talked about the countless times she had tried to talk to the police about lighting, to convince them that more light doesn’t necessarily equal less crime. Another announced that the aurora app on her phone was altering her that there was aurora activity, we looked up but alas couldn’t see any signs of coloured lights in the sky. After the workshop ended, a few of the participants asked to go up the skytower once more. It was darker now and the stars and constellations much more visible than half an hour before, Orion majestically standing in the sky. One woman shared that her mother had very recently passed, and she was reminded of a card she had received, “one more star in the sky”. We reflected on how the stars have been a part of grieving across all cultures, a way to remain connected to our ancestors. We wondered about the ancestors we are disappearing as a result of whitening the night sky.