lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​


i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi


I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory


they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"



Bovigender (click flag for more info!)
bovigender pride flag, by @arina-artemis (click for more info)



botflymother
@botflymother

the only time light pollution is good is when sodium vapor streetlamps reflect off the snow making the cold world glow a warm orange. 3 am sounds of snowplows in the distance but they have not come down the main road yet. walk right down the middle where the dotted lines would be. everything is still despite the storm. sit a minute. hear what the ghosts in the trees have to say. in this moment you are the only living thing amongst the dead. you are an interloper but you are not unwelcome. quite the opposite


adorablesergal
@adorablesergal

True, most sodium lamp designs were annoyingly wasteful in how they would spew light everywhere, including away from the ground. The archetypal bulging street lamp was a really shit design that astronomers loathed and campaigned to change to a recessed design that focused all of its light downward instead of leaking off to the sides.

There were still artsy light installations to contend with, and light still reflects from asphalt and other surfaces at least a little bit, so nothing was going to ever be perfect...

BUT we amateur astronomers had a tool to fight back against light pollution: filters!


Part of the expensive fun of astronomy is collecting filters. Usually the beginners start out with a set of cheap colour filters that will boost the contrast slightly for different targets in our solar system, so-called planetary filters. With the right filter you can make the Great Red Spot on Jupiter visually pop, or tease out Syrtis Major on Mars. They weren't really meant for deep sky objects, though.

And that's when light pollution would rear its ugly head. Solar System targets might get a little washed out, but you could still observe; nothing was stopping the Moon shining down on your light bucket except clouds, but fainter targets like dim nebulae were obliterated from view.

So the next step in an amateur astronomer's journey was to purchase a light pollution filter. There were several varieties that fell into two basic categories: broadband, and narrowband. Narrowband was a bit tighter in the amount of light it rejected, which might affect the viewing of some objects, but either choice got the job done in a light to moderately light-polluted area because we knew the specific wavelengths of excited sodium and we could tell those wavelengths to kick rocks. It worked out quite well, and it was a good enough solution that we could still do astrophotography in the city if we were skilled enough.

The LED Era

I'm not saying we shouldn't have switched to LEDs. Facing down climate change, any savings in energy usage is precious (though cryptobros have definitely ruined that for everyone, thanks a lot), but the switch to LEDs was a disaster for the amateur astronomer. Instead of emitting light in very specific wavelengths, outdoor LEDs were often bright white, and barfed every visible wavelength you could think of onto the ground, off of buildings, into the air, etc. And since they could be pushed to be brighter while still using less energy than sodium lamps, the assumption was that brighter == safer, and light pollution got worse, AND we lost the ability to effectively filter out light pollution, since those precious bands we would normally let starlight and space clouds trickle through were now flooded with terrestrial photons from white LEDs.

Today, it's not as bad. We've learned that brighter doesn't always mean better (motorists complained about the glare, for instance). Many installations are now tinted to be a warmer colour as well as being slightly more dim so that no one's retinas burn out on the way home. It turns out dark adapted-eyes were still important; bright light with lots of blue wavelengths destroyed people's ability to see into dark areas, and that, ironically, made the night more dangerous, not less. We also still walked away with lessons on how not to waste light, though some people still can't resist pointing these fuckers up towards the sky.

It took a while, but cities did eventually listen to amateur astronomers, and though the night sky is getting inescapably brighter because populations are growing, and cities are growing, we admit that it could've been a LOT worse.

Except now those billionaire fucks are launching tens of thousands of satellites into orbit to fund their off-world retirement homes. Terrestrial astronomy is kinda in rough straits lately.

I don't want to deter anyone from amateur astronomy, though! It's still such a rewarding, chill activity, and getting a 50mm-90mm diameter telescope is cheap, and lets you see the Moon, major planets, and some of the brighter star clusters and double stars even in an urban or suburban environment. I bought a 100mm refractor because I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to get out to dark sky sites all that often, and it has served me well for decades.

Check to see if your city or town has a local astronomy club, and say hello. Try out some of their scopes. Let them help you make a decision (they love creating new astronomy addicts).

And if you want to know more about keeping our skies as dark as possible, check out DarkSky International:


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in reply to @botflymother's post:

my favorite boston memories are during The Great Snow Storm Of Like 2013 where the sodium vapor bounced off the clouds and the snow and the fog from the sublimating snow and made 3am look like 3pm-but-yellow, with the clouds and snow absorbing all echos.

like the area's ancestral memories of when things were dark enough that the moon would just make things look like that.

in reply to @adorablesergal's post:

they started replacing the warm orange lights in my neighborhood with the godawful bright white LEDs and it literally made me join darksky, i hate it so much. used to be such a nice cozy glow in the winter but now on snowy nights my bedroom is almost daytime bright with the light reflecting. radicalized by lack of coziness

on the LED frount, the implementation in the UK is mixed, Welsh Highways has done the sensible thing of using warm white LEDs on their roadway lighting, however my council on residential roads has decided to use cool white leds