BY: Mark Gibson

This section is dedicated to reducing excessive use of street lighting where we work, where we live, and where we play.  The leed photo on this page is not beautiful but shows how cities across the planet using street lights improperly.  The current use of lighting directs lights indiscriminately into space as evidenced by these photos.

This image of Asia and Australia at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

According to the IPCC: We can act on climate change but time is running out

Limiting climate change demands strong and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels.

The easiest way to stop the excessive light we have going into space is to simply cut off the offending lights.  This is not easily done.  When the power company sells you a street light they use a light that comes on at dark and goes off when it is light with no choice on cutting it off for special events like UN Earth Day.

The lights we use now currently waste energy by shining lights on buildings where it is sometimes not needed to shining lights in our neighbors bedrooms.  The answer we all must start looking at our street light usage, our neighbors street light usage and our local businesses street light usage.  We also must go to our cities and see if our own city is causing global climate change by wasting energy by shining the lights into space.  It is our responsibility.

Like the IPCC says Strong and Sustained reductions in green house gasses.  How about cutting off overuse of these street lights as we see from space? We would be able to cut 50% of the street lights without any loss of security. Most city websites has a section to report street light outages but there is no listing to report streetlight trespass.

We are in the 21st century.  Pictures like this showing effects of a power outage in Houston should not be possible to be seen from space.  Direct light where it is needed on the ground.  We should also reduce the wattage of the light to the minimum necessary to see the activity we need to see.  Using wattage unnecessary causes more use of fossil fuels and it is our business.

The nighttime lights data were acquired with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA–NASA Suomi NPP satellite. VIIRS has a low-light sensor—the day/night band—that measures light emissions and reflections. Data are processed by a team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to account for changes in the landscape (such as snow cover), the atmosphere, and Moon phase.

This photograph, taken by astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik from the International Space Station (ISS), shows nighttime lights over Japan on November 6, 2017. The lights are concentrated around three of the country’s major cities: Tokyo (top cluster), Nagoya (middle), and Osaka (bottom).

About Mark Gibson:  Mark Gibson has been an advocate against the overuse of outdoor lighting since 1970. He recognized the wasted lighting as a result of his amateur astronomy activity.