Technology

59223 readers

3375 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

646

The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it (www.space.com)

submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is "noctalgia." In general, it means "sky grief," and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Additionally, you’d use a different kind of light for street lights. On the island of Hawaii, that island specifically has a light pollution law that mandates all street lights have to use an orange light bulb, and they can only be in certain places. It’s amazing because you can see so many stars in the night sky.

If city lights are gonna be on 24/7, we should start to see if we can get traction for reduced brightness and installing less light polluting lights.

[–] carbrewr84@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's technically not orange light bulbs they have to use, it's a specific lamp style called 'low pressure sodium'

Here's an article that explains the reasoning behind Hawaii's lighting sources and the regulations:
https://www.accessfixtures.com/hawaii-lighting-ordinances-dark-sky-regulations/

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

That site is claiming that phosphor-converted amber LEDs provide all the benefits of low-pressure sodium. They do not; one of the benefits of LPS is that astronomers have a very narrow frequency band to filter out, while PC amber is much wider. Monochromatic amber LEDs are more comparable to LPS.

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

We put a yellow bulb for our house porch light, and it doesn't even attract bugs! It's like a win/win.