The shift to LED lighting is stopping us from seeing our night skies

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Astronomy News

Pollution,Energy

From an energy perspective, the move away from sodium vapour lamps to LEDs is great, but the news isn't so good when it comes to light pollution. The way we illuminate the world needs to be part of our green agenda, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

A story I like to tell from my childhood, to help people understand the importance of dark night skies, is about growing up in Los Angeles next to a freeway. I am a child of the smoggy 1980s and 1990s in LA, when the air quality was infamously bad. The city was also incredibly lit-up at night. The smog and light pollution created a situation where we could see almost no celestial features except for the moon and sometimes Venus.

The problem with sodium vapour lighting is that it is less energy efficient than newer technologies. Around the time I was in Chile, there was a big policy push to shift to LED lighting, which uses a lot less energy. It is a great idea. The only problem? The transformation to LED lighting, which was advanced by policy-makers across the US, didn’t come with a requirement that the light be filtered to only a single frequency, the way sodium lights work.

Light pollution can be a problem in any frequency, of course, especially when lighting isn’t focused on the place where it is needed: the ground, not the sky. Broad-spectrum LED lighting adds to these challenges when it isn’t carefully regulated.

 

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