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Right? Exactly. Yeah. Welcome. Um, it's great to see all of you here. Um, I'm Kathy Simons. Uh, it's a Kathy Simons from last year's Pam H.W. News story. Who wants you to turn your lights off? Not that one, but actually that was. We really appreciated the story. But actually, what I would really like as a member of the H.W dark Sky Committee, it that just formed a few months ago. What I would really like is for all of us to understand, better, understand and appreciate the beauty and the importance of the dark side to all living things that for millennia, until just a very short time ago, have evolved in a cycle of light and dark, with only the stars in the moon to illuminate the night. So let's just be brief. But this is our group's first public outreach. Um, and I want to begin by thanking, uh, the co-sponsoring groups that helped get us this turnout and the individuals who have helped and supported us. And those include the Hamilton Woman Library, especially Jessica Preciado, the adult services librarian.

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The folks who contributed these wonderful landscape photographs, including Marty Crouch and Michael Gordon, who are with us somewhere over here.

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At the Merrimack Country County. Um, sorry. Camera club. Also, John Gale and the North Shore Amateur astronomy club. Who is John?

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Bell? The North Shore regional manager of the Trustees of Reservations. Unable to be here this evening. But password. Oh, and has passed word that the star party that was cancelled last night is not going to be rescheduled for tomorrow night because we got bad weather again. Um, also, Jane Rummel, the Essex County Greenbelt, uh, sponsor, who is also busy with events and unable to join us this evening. And finally, H.W. Kam, um, they are taping, uh, the program and that will be available for viewing later on on their website.

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$20 of view.

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And finally, a big thanks to all of you for turning out this evening during such a busy time. Um, please note that we have a hard stop at 745, but that should give us plenty of time to move through Kelly's presentation and have a nice, robust question and answer period. Um, and I'm hoping that you have signed in on the sign up sheet in the back on the back table. If you want to stay in touch with us, we're really looking for people to, um, join our small gathering and, uh, contribute to our thinking about next steps and future events and that your contact information will be critical to our being able to outreach you. Um, and that's about it. Um, it's now my great pleasure to introduce our speaker, Kelly Beatty, an astronomer and science journalist who's been active in efforts to reduce light pollution for over 30 years. Kelly is the former senior editor of Sky and telescope magazine. He is a former board member of dark Sky international and a current board member of Massachusetts Dark Sky. It is truly an honor and a privilege to have him with us tonight. Please give him a warm welcome. Kelly Beatty.

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Thank you so very much. All right. So, uh, thank.

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You all for coming. I have a mic here. Are you able to hear me? Yes. All right. Good. That's great. Um. I am thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled for the invitation and thrilled for this great turnout. Um. It's. What what the team here is doing is starting to do. And with your help, will do more of is so very important. So I am going to get right into this. And the first thing we're going to do is concentrate on this photo which is taking the Archers Arches National Park, uh, out in Utah. And you can see the breathtaking Milky Way that is on display there. A lot of the truly dark places in left in our country, um, are out west from the Rockies onward, but there are many of them in Maine, too, as you'll see in a little bit. And so I want to set the stage for you and have you pay attention to this quote. Our civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, none more completely than with night, with lights and ever more lights. We drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the force and the sea. I could have written that yesterday. I didn't write that. It was written by Henry Beeston almost a century ago, when he was taking a year on Cape Cod and soaking it all in. And that's the experience that he had. So we're going to be talking tonight about light pollution And simply put, light pollution is any disturbance of the night by artificial light sources. And there are many ways that we just that we define this. We'll talk a lot about all of these. Glare is when something really strong hits your eye. Think bright headlights on an oncoming car that's glare, a badly pointed security light that's glare and many others. And then trespass. Which is when all of that happens from your neighbor's property or business onto your property, and you need to buy blackout shades in order to sleep at night. Not a good combination. And then finally, any disturbance and we'll talk about many of those. So the irony is that a lot of the light we generate in our 24 over seven society goes up into the sky and never, ever lights the ground, which is its intended purpose. So Public Enemy, My first criminal here that I wanted to point out is you've all seen lights like this. These are stylish antique lighting, you know, from bygone era. And they make. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. They make. They make Our Lady look very pretty during the daytime. But I want you to pay attention to the bulb, which is right here, which is just sitting there in the middle of this glass fixture. And it looks very pretty during the daytime. And I swear to you, all of the municipal planners who buy these lamps, they've never seen what they look like at night because they would never have picked this particular light. You can see, by the way, if you want it, especially the photographer's here. If you want to take pictures like this, wait for a foggy night. It makes everything you see exactly what's going on. But this is instructive because I can use this to kind of show you how we who play around with this a lot. Uh, divide up the light. Now, I want to say straight away you heard the introduction. I am not a professional lighting person. Right? I have been self-taught. Everything that you're hearing from me, self-taught, for better or worse, and many years of paying attention to what's going on. So anything that is emitted above horizontal is called up light. That's pretty self-explanatory. And that is light that never is ever going to hit the ground. It's going to illuminate the bellies of birds and airplanes flying overhead. Um, and then there is this big area of useful light, which is good. That's why we have the light out there in the first place. It's the target area, the task area though. I will note, for those of you who can see it, that this particular light casts a big shadow right underneath it, exactly where you think it would want to be shining light, but it's not. And then this third area is called the glare zone. It's below horizontal, but not much. We'll talk about glare a lot tonight. Glare has become, um, the sort of, uh, most important word in a lot of what we try to do when we control light at night. And let me be clear, I am not arguing for having no light at night, although there are certainly places in our world where having no light at night and a lot of the open space that you have here, the conservation space falls into that category. What I'm hoping for is the right kind of light, intelligently designed light. And so let's let's move forward. And the reason I tell you that this glare is important is these are computer simulations that show what happens to the the photons of light when they're emitted in different directions. The top panel is almost directly overhead. You know you've all seen. And I will show you pictures of the earth at night. Taken from spacecraft. That's the kind of light we're talking about here. And if you think about it, that light goes shooting up through the atmosphere and out into space and spends a relatively short period of time actually illuminating anything. But as you take that light and you bend it farther and farther down toward the horizon, uh, the as you can see, the amount of light pollution, the amount of sky glow increases dramatically, especially for lights that are aimed just above horizontal. I figure you're probably 15 to 20 miles away from downtown Boston here. Maybe not even that. 15. What were you, 20? All right, we'll have a raffle. Um, when you look, look up into the sky at night, directly overhead. Part of the light pollution that you see is created in Boston by light fixtures that are sending their light out like this. And the nature of light sources like that is they create scatter all along their path. And so the light pollution that you see overhead even here, and you'll see some dramatic examples in the seq, is not necessarily from local sources. It can come from a long ways away, and that's what that shows. So here are some examples of good and bad lights. Mostly bad. We don't see too many of these anymore, but there was a time when most of our streets were illuminated by this. We call it the Cobra Head for obvious reasons. There's no fangs, but the light bulb is right here inside this sort of faceted salad bowl that hangs underneath. And that that glass is actually used to distribute the light from a single bulb. But the problem is where that bulb is located. It also sends some light up into the atmosphere and that these high angles that I was talking about.

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Those were largely replaced by the one down at the bottom. And in this case, the bulb is here up inside the the case and all the light shines down out through the bottom. And that's good. That's what we call fully shielded lighting. And I want to call your attention to the little hockey puck sitting on top of the fixtures. These are the little things that determine when it's day or night. Light fixtures like these were never designed to be turned on and off a lot. So those little doodads, uh, turn the lights on at dusk and leave them on all night and turn them on in the morning. And for those who are taking notes, it's 4125 hours of light over the course of a year. This is public enemy number one in my book. This is what we call a wall pack. Um, this is what happens when a business is trying to at the same time illuminate a doorway and its entire parking lot, right? No matter how far away the cars happen to be parked, I won't mention any names, but CVS comes to mind. And this particular wal pack has no business being there because it's on the wall of the research laboratories of the Environmental Protection Agency in Chelmsford. And this is what it looks like when you turn it on from the side view you can see these these fixtures have tremendously broad beams. A lot of this light is never hitting the ground, never hitting the ground. And then I haven't seen any here in town. But in Chelmsford we have a lot of these. These are supplied by National Grid which is your utility company as well. And National Grid, if you're a business owner and you want to illuminate your parking lot, but you're too cheap to get your own fixtures you call National Grid, they rent you one of these? Put it on a pole alongside the road and point it at your parking lot. And like the others there on, you can see the bee's knees up there on top. The hockey pucks. They stay on all night. Even if the pole happens to be across the street from your business, they'll still put one up for you. And this is what that looks like at night, again, very horribly shielded. Um, and so this is, this is this is not good. Not good at all. Now, I know you've had an issue here in town with sports lighting, so I just want to touch on that briefly. This is at the US Tennis Association facility in New York I think it's flushing, New York, which I went down for, uh, a special presentation. Uh, you see, they have many, many tennis courts there. And you can see here these are pretty standard lighting for an old style lighting for a tennis court, and you can see how much glare those create and how much light spill. What might not even be obvious to you is that all of these lights are on two, and they're illuminating the next courts over. These lights are made by the company Musco, which I know was involved in your high school and other lighting projects. They are the industry leader in terms of creating, um, well shielded, very precisely directed lights. And so I just threw that in there because I know it's on your minds. So there's five things I'm going to talk about tonight that that light pollution affects negatively. And the first, I wouldn't be an astronomer if I didn't tell you that we're losing the night sky, the starry night sky at a rapid rate. Uh, some of you. Well, none of you are older than 40. So you wouldn't remember this. That back in 2003, during the summer. We had a massive power outage here in the northeast and left many cities completely in the dark here, where here's where Ottawa was. Toronto was Detroit was Cleveland. Look at them all. They're gone. And and this outage lasted for about 24 hours. So an amateur astronomer living in Toronto, this is in August when the Milky Way is its best in our skies. During the blackout, took a picture toward downtown Toronto. He lived north of the city, toward the south, and captured this beautiful picture of the Milky Way. The next night, the lights had come back on. He took the same picture and this is where he got. So folks, this is what we've lost. For those of you who've never had the chance to really be under a very dark sky, I highly encourage you to do it. Uh, the summertime months are best, although it doesn't really get dark until like 10:00. But make the effort. You'll be rewarded in a dark location And you'll see the majesty of our starry night skies. Now it turns out that about two decades ago, the National Park Service finally realized that the nighttime environment in their parks is just as important as the daytime environment. And so they set about to sort of quantify how much light pollution or what the skies over their parks were like. They created a team of amateur astronomers to go around the country and take pictures in many, many dozens of their, of their parks. And they created these all sky images, which are kind of color coded here, going from black to white. And this is, this is a fisheye view from natural bridges looking overhead. And then this is a panorama all around the horizon. And you see some bright glows. And there are in fact a couple of distant towns that give a little glow here. But this is the Milky Way. That is just the light from the Milky Way, arching, arching across the sky. An incredibly beautiful, dark place. Now compare that with the same equipment taking from Mojave National Preserve in California with Las Vegas about 50 miles away. Can you figure out where Las Vegas is in this plot? Now, these these compilations were actually made up of individual astronomical photos. This being one of them. And this thing here is not some kind of artifact in the photography. It's actually the beam from the Luxor Hotel 50 miles away, shining up into the skies of the Mojave. Sad, sad, sad indeed. And of course, you can see the intense light. We call that a light dome, because it tends to be on the horizon. And having that kind of shape from it, from a distant city a little closer to home. This is Arcadia, one of the ten most popular national parks in the country, and also a very dark place. Many of you, I suspect, have been to Cadillac Mountain, or at least your car has. And, um, there used to be no longer. There used to be a tremendous fall on Autumn Star Festival night festival there. And they they would attract more than a thousand people to the top of Cadillac Mountain to look through telescopes. So you can see again, this is this little blip here. That's Bar Harbor, and it's otherwise a pretty dark sky. Bar Harbor, since this picture was taken, has enacted a dark sky ordinance, an outdoor lighting ordinance. And it's it's a it's a tough sell for them because obviously they depend tremendously on tourism. And so there's a lot of lights one way or the other. And they're trying to control them. But the national park took all of this information to heart and set about retrofitting many of the parks across the country. Yosemite was one of them, Um, uh, near my home. I'm originally from California. California farm boy. Uh, and also the Grand Canyon, which, if you can think about those who've been to the Grand Canyon. It involved thousands of lights, and they replaced them all with night sky friendly lighting. And often that involves what we think of as very low brightness lights, often amber in color. Uh, again, those of you who are older than 40, you remember the yellow bug lights that we used to have on our porches? They were yellow because insects were not attracted to them. Right. And so in modern LED technology, it's the same bugs don't like to be in your yellow lights. And we'll get to the bugs in just a minute. So dark Sky international, formerly called the International Dark Sky Association, uh, created the program to certify genuinely dark locations around the world, actually, but also around the United States in various categories. You see them there at lower left and here in the northeast. There aren't many. There are two in upstate Maine. One is the AMC Appalachian Mountain Club properties, and the other is called Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. I'm going to take a little aside here to tell you that story. If you don't know it, there is a woman named Roxanne Quimby. And you've probably heard of Burt's Bees, right? And that whole franchise. Well, Burt was driving in Maine one day, and he came across Roxanne and her two twin kids hitchhiking, and he picked them up and became infatuated. And they had a relationship. Not the kids, but Roxanne and Burt had a relationship. She helped him grow his business, and she found other uses for the the honeycombs besides just producing honey. And that's where the whole line of lip balms and all that products came from was that era. Eventually, she and Burt parted ways. She ended up with a controlling interest in the company. And I've got to confirm this. But what I was told is the company was told sold to Colgate for $900 million. So she didn't have anything to worry about. She was an avid remains an avid environmentalist. So she bought 90,000 acres of of logging terrain in Maine near the Penobscot, East Penobscot River, and wanted to donate it to the federal government to make a national park. Now, the problem is, to create a national park requires an act of Congress, but to create a national monument only requires a presidential directive. And so she pivoted a little bit. President Obama was in the white House. He created Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, now under the protection of the US Forest Service. And you can go up there and I'm going to tell you, if you want, someplace where the sky is dark, this this place is capital D dark. When they went to get their certification for a dark sky, this is called a dark sky sanctuary, the darkest of the dark. Ida required them to make a list of every light bulb in the property. 90,000 acres. Six light bulbs. Not a hard list to come up with. So that's something you can look forward to. Okay, let's go to number two. Visual impairment. Um, as our eyes age, a couple of things happened. First of all, your pupils at night don't. Do not open as wide as they used to. Um, when you when you're young, your pupils can dilate to maybe about eight millimetres a third of an inch across. But after the age of 40 you lose about one millimetre per decade of life. So those of you with grandchildren who are eight, nine, ten years old, they can see fainter stars than you can. That's one thing. The other thing is, as you many of you know, the eye starts to kind of malfunction with age. We get cataracts, we get a lot of cloudiness and extra scatter in our eyes, which makes it very difficult to see well at night. And one of the things that makes it difficult to see well at night is glare. When you have a bright light source shining in your face. Here is a little physiology lesson for you. During the day, your eyes record the world using a system of sensors in the eye on the retina called cones. And those cones are what we use for color vision. So say co cone's color okay. And the peak sensitivity of those cones is right here in the yellow green part of the spectrum, which corresponds to the peak light of the sun's output. The peak wavelength for the sun's output. So that's a sort of evolutionary no brainer. But at night we don't use cones. We use a different set of sensors in the eye called rods. Rods are super sensitive. You can see that scale on the left hand the edge. That's a log scale rods are about a thousand times more sensitive to light than the cones are. It's what we think of as our night vision, what we used to see in the dark. But rods are the two things about rods. First of all, notice that the peak sensitivity is no longer in the yellow. It's in the blue part of the spectrum. And we'll say a lot about that in a second. And the other thing is that.

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It's a black.

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And white system. Rods do not deliver color information to your brain. And so when you're you're going out at night and you're trying to find your red car in a dimly lit parking lot, and they all look gray. That's why. That's why. Okay, so here's glare for you. Here's a standard issue suburban, residential, poorly designed. But we many people that, you know, maybe you have them security light and you can see the intense glare from it. The glare is very intense from this light. It keeps you from seeing the guy standing in the open doorway of the fence that is otherwise area. Would you like to see that again? That, that. All right, so, uh, there's a reason, folks, that we have lampshades on our lamps at home. It's to take the harsh light from a bulb and diffuse it so that it's softer and illuminating the whole room instead of coming from one direction. The same thing happens with those dang headlights on the newfangled cars. I don't have to worry about this. I'm driving a 1999 Jetta with 285,000 miles on it. I have crank windows and a manual transmission.

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All right.

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So those lights coming at you. You know, it's a kind of a double edged sword, because on the one hand, they're extremely, uh, harsh for you to look at as that car is coming toward you. Or maybe it's a pickup behind you, depending. Um. And that's because your eyes remember, the rods are very sensitive to blue light, and those new headlights produce far more blue light than the old style headlights do. So that's what glare can do. It can be a real problem. Now let's move on. Environmental consequences something that I know is is important to many of you. Maybe all of you. There are by by my actual account, there are 70% of all species at night. Uh, Our active. They eat, they mate, they migrate, and they're just active at night. And so you won't be surprised to learn that many of them are very sensitive, adversely so to light at night. There's no better poster child for this than fireflies. We all love fireflies, and I hope you all have lots of them in your yards or on your properties. Fireflies are most active, by the way. Right at dusk you've probably noticed this, which is exactly the time that you turn on your porch. Lights don't do that. Fireflies are very sensitive, and I don't know if you know this. There are many different species of fireflies, and as they're going out flashing at night, they have different patterns of flashing that that represents their species. And it's the males who are flashing and they're saying to the females, come hither. Um, and so the problem is that if you have, there's the flash pattern. If you have a lot of light pollution going on, then they cannot be seen. And it turns out that research shows that in a light polluted setting, the males still go out and they're flashing their little tails off, and the females stay home because they don't want to be out in that light pollution. And so no mating takes place. And so that's that's definitely bad. Um, more broadly, I know many of you are familiar with pollinators, and we think of pollinators as butterflies and bees. But what you might not know that a lot of pollination takes place at night, primarily by moths. And likewise, when moths are in a light polluted environment, they don't go out. Pollination doesn't take place. This is a bad system, okay? A strong lights like this will keep moths or other nighttime pollinators from going anywhere near the plants in this yard, more broadly, insects appear to be strongly affected by by all kinds of factors. In the last 50 years, we have lost 75% of all insects. I'm going to repeat that in the last 50 years we have lost 75% of all insects. It's called the insect apocalypse. I didn't make it up. You can go look it up. Google will give you many, many sources. And of course many things are involved in that loss of habitat, pesticides. But light pollution is a biggie in that insect loss. And so what happens is that a lot of insects are attracted to bright lights at night, and that makes them easy pickings for other predators on them, like bats, for example. And also they fly around that bulb all night and they just they're exhausted and they die in the morning. Uh, there was a reason that those yellow bug lights worked and you can still find them, although they're incandescent, so they use a lot of energy. Then finally, let's talk about bird migration. Any birders here? I would suspect so. So you know that birds migrate, they fly north, they fly south. And this part of the country, they fly along something called the Atlantic Flyway, which is right here along the coast. Birds migrate in mysterious ways. We think that they have a little nugget of magnetite in their head that allows them to be sensitive to magnetic fields and therefore know what direction they're going. But it's also the case that they have visual cues on lights in their area of vision. So, for example, if they're flying north and the and the moon is off there, you know, the rising full moon is off their right wing. They say, okay, I can deal with that. And they just keep the moon there and they keep flying north. But when you get a building, that's the situation on the left when you put a bright building in the way or a city. Little known fact most songbirds migrate at an altitude of 300ft or less. That makes them very susceptible to all of these big buildings that we have in downtown Boston. Um, and so what happens is their, their, their brains are telling them to keep the light off their wing and they just fly in circles all night long, and many drop from the sky out of exhaustion or dead. And it turns out that nationally, nationally, more than 600 million bird deaths occur by interactions with buildings. And that's that's a lot of birds. If you want more on this information, there's an organization called the Fatal Light Awareness Program flap to get more information there. All right. We're getting to the bigger flora and fauna here. We're talking about humans now. Um, many of you, maybe all of you have heard of melatonin. It's produced in our heads, in our brain by the pineal gland. And the the the way it knows to make melatonin. It only does it at night. Our brains only make melatonin at night in darkness. And it turns out, about 20 years ago, scientists discovered a little sensor in the eye, a light sensor in the eye that has nothing to do with vision and has everything to do with melatonin. It's like an on off switch. It tells the brain, hey, it's dark. Make melatonin. Hey, it's not dark. Don't make the melatonin. And so that when when evening comes, like here in this dimly lit environment, even though you're awake, you don't have to be asleep. As it gets darker, the signals go to the brain to start making melatonin, and so that this is a little chart that represents how much melatonin is in our bloodstream. During the daytime, not so much. At nighttime, the blue is when it peaks. Unless unless you are in the habit of making a run to the fridge in the middle of the night, or you are in the habit of going to the restroom, the bathroom, and flicking on the light switch. And then your melatonin production crashes. And this is primarily why we have jet lag, because we never get the melatonin in our bloodstream. Now, melatonin is a really interesting compound. We don't fully understand its effects, but we think it's active, actively involved in our general.

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Health and well-being, and has influence over a lot of the diseases that we might get. And it's been now almost 40 years when a scientist, Richard Stevens, realized there was a connection between those people who had their circadian rhythms disrupted routinely. Think graveyard shift workers or emergency room nurses and the incidence of certain cancers. Breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men such that we now know that that that kind of work is actually dangerous to us. This is a lab experiment. It looks more complicated than it really is. You can take human cancers and implant them in mice, which is what they did here. And then they took those mice and they put them in two different environments, completely in the dark or 24 over seven light. And not surprisingly, this is the curve for the always in light constant light here. And the vertical scale is how fast do the tumors grow? How big do they get? And it's much faster here than these mice who were kept in complete darkness. And it seems to have to do with the melatonin that's produced. That's the cause and effect. we don't have any experiments. Any experimental evidence for this? In humans, we're not in the business of implanting cancers into people, but that you can see where this trail is leading. And so I would not want to be somebody who lived in this apartment complex, because you can see that the light is going into all the bedroom windows, and it can't be a very pleasant place to live. Actually, this wasn't Chelmsford, but they've since replaced those with really nice lights. That's a good thing. Anyway, it's now been declared that shift work involving circadian disruption is a probable carcinogen to human humans. Now, about 15 years ago now, the American Medical Association got into this, and one of the key players in the AMA's two policies on light pollution is from right around here. Some of you have maybe heard his name, Mario Motta. He lives in Gloucester, and for a while he was on the council for the AMA. He's a retired cardiologist. And so in 2012, the AMA said that nighttime lighting that disrupts your circadian rhythm is potentially harmful to you through these methods. So they also we'll get to the they did the second policy, but I'll get to that in a second. And then my fifth of five bad things that happened because of light pollution is energy waste. This is a picture that I'm sure many of you who have seen a picture of the earth at night taken from satellites, and you can easily make out the cities and towns and stuff. Here's a little bit closer view. This is something called the Blue Marble. Uh, it's a website based in Germany, and you can very clearly see all the major metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada and Mexico as well. And I was looking at this one day and I was noticing a couple of things. What the heck is this up in North Dakota? Here in West Texas, there's nothing but rattlesnakes there. What are those things? Anybody want to guess?

00:36:55,690	S2:
Oil fires. Fracking. Uh, and it's a 24 over seven operation on a massive scale. And so I would hate to try to do any astronomy from those locations, but, you see, they're not alone. There are a lot of places, especially in the eastern half of the contiguous US, that are just very brightly lit. Let's take a view from space, going with the astronauts on the International Space Station. We're going to take a ride up the East Coast. Here is New Orleans. Uh, no, here is New Orleans. That's got to be, uh, Houston. Thank you. Here's Florida, which is a wasteland of light. Thank goodness Miami was cut off. Here's Atlanta. Um, there's no place in Florida that somebody didn't like a light and put one up, I'm telling you. Here's here's all the the Mid-Atlantic, here's, you know, uh, Washington, uh, Baltimore, New York, Philly. Here's us here, here's Cape Cod. Notice how dark central Maine is. And this stuff along here is a combination of aurora and sky glow. And these things up here. Yeah, those are stars. And so there's Nova Scotia going by. This gives you a sense of the fight that we're having to fight here now. There are scientists who specialize in light pollution and its effects on the Earth. And three years ago, a team of them did a study of more than 50,000 citizen science observations of what's called naked eye stellar visibility. These were not satellite photos. These are people on the ground like you, looking up into the sky, making an estimate of how dark the sky was through a method. I'll tell you in a little bit, and then reporting it on a worldwide database. And what these scientists found that was over the period 2011 to 2022, the increase in the skies brightness increased by 7 to 10% per year, 7 to 10% per year. I wish my portfolio got that much money, but it's never going to. That is insane. It's not sustainable. It's an existential threat to the night sky as we know it. And so it's not the same way. They just this pretty much the same team just came out just a couple of weeks ago with another paper. There actually are places it's not uniformly the same. There are places on the Earth that are increasing faster. The US in general is at the 10% level, and there were actually places in the world where the light pollution is decreasing, if you can believe it. One of them is Ukraine, for pretty obvious reasons. All right, well, here's a close up of the eastern. Northeastern US, places you recall. You can see pretty easily. Here is Boston, as photographed by the International Space Station. And I want you to notice these tendrils of light heading west and south. And you're saying to yourself, oh, those are the interstates. That's got to be the mass pike. No they're not. If you think about the mass pike really isn't lit. No, these are the the commercial highways that link us to each other. Route nine. Because there are there are businesses along those corridors where a 24 over seven society now that have their lights on all the time, I won't name names, but the initials for one is McDonald's, for example. Okay, how about you? Let's take a close up look here. This is a light pollution map derived from spacecraft data. So this is light that's headed up into the sky. Um, and, uh, in this scheme, dark blue and black is very good. This is the best we got on this map that's out over the ocean. And, uh, red is really bad. Now, there's no particular reds here. Let's take a look about your little corner of the woods. This is the best I could do with the graphic tool they gave me. But your. Your two towns, Hamilton and Wenham. Shall we take a look at how things are going for you? This is the the light pollution as measured from space in this spot right here over the last 14 years. By the way, that map that I showed you was from October of 20 of last year before snow again started. Uh, and I'll show you. You see the really high peaks here. Those are the where the most light is being reflected. And if you're observant and you're all very observant, you'll see that they occur during winter. And that's when there's snow on the ground and the snow, the the snow reflects a lot more light out into space than you otherwise wouldn't. So often when I do, when I do plots like this, I eliminate those peaks to basically, you want to look at the stuff that's going on down here. Okay. And I'm happy to say that according to satellite data, the the brightness of your sky has been decreasing by about 2% per year. And that's great. But before you give yourself a pat on the back, there's two things I need to tell you. First of all.

00:42:17,380	S2:
These satellites don't measure blue light. They are blind at blue light. They can't see anything that's blue. And since in the last 15 years, lots of us and our towns have installed blue rich LEDs. The satellites don't see that as as an increase. They can't see that light. The other thing I want to tell you is let's see what was the color of the light that our eyes are most sensitive to at night? Blue. Right. And so the fact that the satellites are are blind and blue light. And yet our eyes are seeing the blue light most strongly that you have to take graphs like this with a grain of salt. There there are. They're an approximation. If there is a case to be made that their total amount of light here is going down, and you can see those numbers on the left hand side there. Those are pretty good numbers in a city. In a big city setting, those numbers would be in the tens of thousands. So congrats to you for having for living in and trying to preserve a fairly dark environment. Good for stargazing. That, by the way, if you have your phones out, I know you've turned them all off, but the cameras still work. This is the website you want to go to to create handy little maps like this. The light pollution maps and also the curves are at this at this website. All right. Thanks to an, I was able to get a few pictures from around town here. And I don't want to incriminate anybody, but. All right, so this is this is the Cumberland Farms, I believe. And I want you to notice that the lighting on the canopy here, that's pretty good lighting, right? You don't see any glare from that? I think the problem is an described it and correct me if I'm wrong, these are supposed to be turned off at 10:00, and this picture was taken at 11 or 1130. Right. So these are, these are lights that should not be on. Uh, it might be because the whole canopy is all the way up. It might be that there's still pumping gas, but it's all dark inside. So I'm guessing not since the business closes at ten. There's another place with gas pumps in your town. This one. And? And do you know the name of this place?

00:44:38,789	S4:
I think it's the handles. We've been in store.

00:44:40,630	S2:
Yes. Okay. The owner of that one, when he locks the door at night or she turns off all the lights. And so, you know, with the exception of a couple of lights on the indoors, that's probably on the Pepsi machine in there. Um, this is a pretty dark setting, and I wish more businesses did that. I know you don't have an outdoor lighting ordinance in your town, but as you go out and talk to business owners, ask them, can you turn off your lights when the store is closed? Can you turn off the lights that illuminate your parking lot? Because I guarantee you, no one is going to sneak in and try to steal asphalt protecting the entrances to the building? Sure. Uh, having motion sensors? Sure. having your parking lot lit up all night. Your your gas station pumps lit up all night. It's just not just not good. This is a building. I think this is a, um.

00:45:38,429	S3:
Uh.

00:45:39,150	S2:
Maintenance building of some kind. And you can see the lights on the side. They're pretty good lights. All the light is pointing down. Um, you can argue that there are too bright. And they they are. You can also argue that, like, what are they protecting here on this blank wall that needs three? Not just one, but three lights. It makes complete sense to have lighting over the doorways and over windows. The entry points where where people can get in. It makes no sense. And I see this all the time, having bright lights on the sight of a complete brick wall. And maybe you're just inviting people to come and say, hey, bring some spray paint and tag me. All right, this is my last slide here. I'm not telling you where this is to protect the innocent. But clearly what you've got here is at least a half a dozen lights that are just out of control. From the standpoint of glare, I can tell that the color of them is very bright white and maybe bluish white, and I'm guessing that they're on all night, every night. Uh, no matter whether there's anybody in this facility or not. And you want to divulge.

00:46:55,070	S4:
Um, that's the road going up to the, uh, theological seminary.

Yeah. 00:46:59,030	S3:
Okay.

00:46:59,949	S2:
And obviously, the snow is making the situation worse. But, Anne, thank you for these photos.

Okay. 00:47:07,989	S3:
So we all have our work cut out for.

00:47:10,110	S2:
Us here and elsewhere. We're going to talk a little bit about LEDs. LEDs are a once in a multi-generational innovation for lighting our night. The LEDs that you see everywhere, especially street lights, are replacing street lights that were designed in the 50s and 60s. Now, most of those lights that were replaced, you may remember, have a kind of peachy color to them. Those are called high pressure sodium lights. In their time, they were pretty efficient. But high pressure sodium lights have a whole bunch of things bad about them by modern standards, not the least of which is they don't like to be turned on and off. They're like a fluorescent bulb in that respect. And so consequently, most of those lights are on the outside. They go on at dusk and they go off at dawn every night. So you can see the potential for LEDs to be incredibly energy efficient is is beyond reproach. And so, not surprisingly, they have become ubiquitous in our nighttime and daytime environments. So I'm going to teach you a little bit of star stuff right now. Our sun has a surface temperature of about 10,000°F. In the Kelvin scale, that's about 6000 Kelvin. That's this. That's what the K stands for. And so that curve is a curve of how much light the sun puts out at various wavelengths. And you can see that it peaks right in that yellow green spot there. It turns out that as the temperature of a star gets cooler and stars do have different temperatures, the not only does the amount of light they emit go down, but the peak of that, their peak wavelength shifts to the red and you can see those other curves. Look at 4000 is here, 3000 here. This is way in the red. Now, as counterintuitive, we were taught to think that red means hot and blue means cold. But what color is a candle flame? Anyone? Yellow, right. What color is the flame on your barbecue? Glue your gas flames or your cooktops, which is the hotter flame? The blue one by a lot. And so we take that sort of notion, and we use it to describe the color of lights and how much, in particular how much blue is in those lights. Unless you have been sleeping for the last 45 minutes, you have heard me say multiple times that blue light is the culprit. At night it creates a most sky glow, most scattering your eye, the most circadian disruption, the most nocturnal environment disruption, and and a host of other things that I can't remember right now. But those are four biggies. And so the name of the game here is to reduce the amount of blue light in our nighttime environment. Think about this our way long ago, ancestors grew up in a time with a lot of exposure to full spectrum sunlight, right? They didn't hide in the cave all day. They went out hunting, and then at night, it was dark. And so their circadian, what we inherited from an evolutionary point of view, is a very strong circadian rhythm. And that's great. But now think about our modern existence during the day. How many of you spend any appreciable time out in the sun? Probably not. Many of you. Good. One, two. Uh, wear sunscreen, hat. And then at night, we take we're like this. We're in a sort of dimly lit environment up until midnight or longer. Uh, that's why you hear people now saying, take your devices and turn them off as you go to bed, because it is messing up your circadian cycle. And and again, when I told you your body starts producing melatonin when it's dark, you don't have to be asleep yet. So as your evening winds down. Start turning off lights in your house and getting it dim and cozy and maybe even romantic. Your body will thank you for that. Okay, so we've taken this notion of of temperature equating to the color of light. And we've created a scale called the correlated color temperature. And this is a simulation. But you get the point. The higher the number the higher the temperature, the more blue light is present in that light source. And so the name of the game is to use sources that have low color temperatures so that we don't, we don't admit, emit as much, um, blue light. Any engineers here. Good. So I don't have to explain how I get 120V onto this wooden box.

00:52:08,880	S2:
I have here two bulbs. They're both seven watt LED bulbs. They both put out 800 lumens of light. You ready?

00:52:21,610	S2:
See any differences? Yeah. This one has a color temperature of 2700 Kelvin. And this one has a color temperature of 4000. Right. So you can clearly see the color difference. But doesn't this one look brighter.

00:52:38,530	S4:
Yeah.

00:52:39,010	S2:
That's because of your eye and the you know, those rods that peak in the in the blue part of the spectrum, they are much, much more sensitive to blue light at night. I'll turn it off to spherical. Um, uh, then, then during the daytime. So color temperature has become a really important, uh, criterion. Uh, with my pointer.

00:53:05,530	S2:
Hello?

00:53:09,730	S2:
No, no, no. It's here. Here we go. Oh, nope. Nope. Nope. Oh. That's weird. It's not in the box. It's not in my pocket.

00:53:23,809	S2:
Well, we'll just. I'll find it. Oh, here it is. Cleverly disguised as a wood tone. Um, so color temperature. Something that's very important. And in fact, every time you go to buy a light bulb these days, the package that is the bulb is in has all the information that you used to have. Like how many watts of electricity does it use? How many lumens. That's the unit for how much light is produced, how many lumens, what its lifetime is. And now you get a color temperature value. This whole thing started back in the compact fluorescent days. You know, the little curlicue things. And if you might remember, you used to be able to buy, uh, three kinds, right? One was warm white. One was cool white and one was daylight. And you probably bought daylight because you thought that was the best to buy. The warmer, the lower the color temperature you can get, the better for inside your home and outside as well. And it's important for me to mention that when you get a bulb that's a lower color temperature, you're not getting less light lumens or lumens, you've just shifted the wavelength. Okay. So so it's like when you go to buy paint, black paint comes in the same can as the white paint. There are different colors, but you get the same amount of paint. You can use that one. Okay. So here's a high pressure spectrum high pressure sodium spectrum. And you can see this is the old style has a CCD a color temperature of about 2200 Kelvin very low. That 2200 will come into play in just a second. You can see that the bulb gives off several strong lines of orange and yellow light. That's why those bulbs have a yellowish orange cast to it. Now here, by contrast, are LED bulbs at two different color temperatures. And I want you to notice here's the 5000 K. Look at this in very strong blue spike. Now we get we can get different color temperatures by kind of tricking the bulb. We paint the inside with something called a phosphor. Same thing happens on a fluorescent tube that changes the color of of the light. So a 3000 Kelvin fixture has a lot less blue light when. That's good. But I want you to take another look at this curve. All right. Because I'm going to show you it again right here. The heavy black line is the emission curve for an LED. A blue rich LED. The thin black line here that your eyes sensitivity during the daytime. That's what your cones are sensitive to. And the dashed line is the sensitivity of that little sensor in your eye that tells the pineal gland to make melatonin. You couldn't have picked a worse place for a spike of blue light than in an LED. That's why we're so concerned about LEDs and the effect that they are having on our on our entire environment. Now, lots of towns have installed LED streetlights as I was driving in. I confess this is my first time to Hamilton and Wenham. I didn't see too many streetlights and the few that I saw were LEDs I would. This is downtown Cambridge where the homes are right up against the road. I would not like to have this bedroom window, but to Cambridge's credit, they use something called active controls. Their street lights after 10:00 at night automatically dimmed to about. It's either a half or a third of their normal brightness, so it's possible to control LEDs in ways that we never could have done with high pressure sodium. But nonetheless, there are a lot of lights. You know, one of the things that has happened is what we call lumen creep. Now that we have these fancy LEDs, right when you go to the store, you can buy what used to be a 60 watt light for your porch. And now it's only seven watts. And so you say, oh, seven watts. I'm saving so much money. I'm going to get a ten watt LED or a 15 watt LED and replace my porch light with something that's much, much stronger and way stronger than you actually need. And so what happens is cities over light their their streets in particular businesses over light their properties strongly. And so I'm sorry it didn't get to the punchline here. This is the second. This is the second policy by the AMA from a decade ago that, uh. That encourages the use of lighting. Uh, for outdoor lighting. 3000 Kelvin or lower. Now, when I started in this game, uh, you know, involved with LEDs. You could not buy a 3000 Kelvin bulb. It just didn't exist. You got maybe 6000. And maybe if you were lucky, 4000. And now 3000 and 2700 are the norm. The market has spoken. People like the warm color of those bulbs, and they're going lower all the time. And so consequently, the town of Pepperell about three years ago decided to replace its high pressure sodium lights with LEDs. And they did something smart. They had a contest. They asked the town, ask their suppliers to install a whole set of different lights and pick one. The population was. Citizens were encouraged to pick a light and vote on which one they like this and what they like best. Were the 2200 Kelvin ones. So one of these pictures is a high pressure sodium bulb, and the other one is a 2200 Kelvin LED streetlight.

00:59:15,619	S2:
It's the one on the left is the LED. And so less glare, lower cost. You can see the the the the even the illumination on the street is more even was favored by the citizens, better coverage and vastly less expensive to operate. Now, when I started in this game, when you were 30 years ago, I was a voice in the wilderness. I was seen as one of those astronomers who want us all to kill our lights so that he can watch the stars. It's not that anymore. For all the reasons I've told you tonight, there are so many reasons to do a good job lighting our nighttime environment. It's become a mainstream A media common story about how light pollution is taking over, how not no one likes it, and the picture on National Geographic there. It's getting a little dated, but it was the cover story in 2008. Uh, I'm happy to say that it isn't downtown Boston, but it is downtown Chicago. Probably the worst that I have seen. Uh, you can see how horrible that lighting is now. A lot of what I have told you, a lot of what I have told you tonight, um, is in a more compressed form. A public service announcement. It's about ten minutes long. That dark sky produced some time ago. It doesn't have as much on LEDs as I would like, but it's still very good. You can find it at the dark Sky website or just on YouTube. Search for losing the dark. Losing the dark. That's the name of the of the little video. And you'll give you a lot of the information that we've got here. And it turns out that in the beginning, like 20 years ago, when when I started getting seriously involved on this, the lighting industry itself was opposed to what we were doing. They did not want us to create light that was better controlled, because it would be a it would be a problem for them to design fixtures that did it. They were invested in keeping the status quo, putting up those wall packs on every E.P.A. lab they could find. Right. And so they had a change of heart gradually over time. And six years ago, the EIS, which is the Illuminating Engineering Society, it is the standard setting organization for all lighting indoor and out within the United States. And dark Sky partnered to create what are called the five Principles of Responsible Outdoor Lighting. You can see them there. Lights. You have a purpose B pointed where it's needed. No brighter than necessary. Used only when it's needed and used the warmest possible colour temperature. All the things I've been talking about, we're now like arm in arm, fighting this fight. There's a little graphic that kind of shows that in graphic form, the idea is to get from the left hand side to the right hand side eventually. And so now I'm going to talk just in closing, a couple of things that you can do individually and collectively. What can you do to make our world better at night, at least from a lighting point of view? First, shield your external lights. Make them all point down. You might have a security light on the outside of your house, and you might not have it be fully shielded, but it's probably on a pivot and I encourage you to point it down. That's number one. Second is use these warm color temperature color temperature bulbs. They are now ubiquitous. I made I make multiple trips to Home Depots. and there are lots and lots of low color temperature bulbs. And don't forget, they will sell you not just what's on their shelf, but it's what's on their website too, so you can seek out these things. The dark Sky has a whole section on dark sky friendly lighting. What the model numbers are and the outputs and so forth. You could try that. Use low output bulbs, don't make it too bright and use dimmable bulbs if you can. A lot of LEDs can be dimmed now and and why not? And then of course turn them off when they're not needed. And if you're too lazy to flip the switch up and down, then put a timer or a motion detector on it. It always amazes me that so many people have backyard security lights, like the one I showed you at the beginning that shine all night long, illuminating everything in the yard, out to great distances. Uh, yeah. You know, maybe you've got a one acre property and you're trying to light every corner of it with a light slapped onto the side of your house. Not going to happen. And so the thing is, if you've got a security light on all night, every night, and you're not in the habit of staring out your bedroom window all night, then people can come and go in your yard and you would never know it. Whereas a motion sensor, if it comes on. Yes, I know there are animals and you can you can adjust them. So it's relatively insensitive to small things. But if you have a motion sensor when it comes on, when the bad guy enters your backyard and the light comes on, it's like, hey, I see you. And so you can you can help your security that way. One of the last things I want to show you is this. This is not from Wenham or Hamilton. I picked a safe place. This is Nantucket, and this is a private school that had these horrible, glaring bulbs on all sides of the building, and Nantucket has one of the strongest outdoor byelaws anywhere, because they're. They're trying to get dark Sky certification, and they're well on their way to doing that. And part of it is that you need an outdoor lighting bylaw that could be a path for you at some point in the future. You have so much wetlands and open space that you're trying to conserve. Becoming a dark Sky certified place is not out of reach for you. So here in Nantucket, this is on a school. They have this strict bylaw and enforcing it. All they did was take the lights and point them down and they got this. It's important to remember that when you shield the light, when you point it down, you don't reduce how much light is being created, you just reduce how it's distributed. So instead of being a glare source, now we've taken that light and we've washed the whole exterior wall. That whole wall becomes the light source. And it's very even and very, uh, pleasant to, to, to look at. There's a reason why you have light lampshades in your house around your bulbs. I mentioned that before. I'm going to get back to this number, the 50,000 citizen science observations. These were made by people just like you, with no experience, no telescopes. All you did was you went to a website called globe at night. Will you repeat that with me, please? Globe at night. This is important because you're going to have homework, okay. And what you do is when you go to that there's a there's an app or you can print out a chart like this. And astronomers measure the faintness of stars that can be seen using something called magnitude. And so consequently, the fainter the stars you can see that higher that number. And so you go to the Globe at Night website. Or they have an app for your phone. And if you're using your phone, Obviously, the system knows where you are. You put in your location what your cloud conditions are, how many stars you can see. You pick the option that most matches your sky and you hit send. And then that becomes part of a worldwide database. Now, if you want to really get into this and I say this more to you from an organizational point of view, they make a little doodad called a squat, a sky quality meter. It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes. It's got one button right and it will give you a numeric measurement. You can see there it says 1966, a numeric measurement of how dark your sky is, that you can tell globe at night. And it's much more accurate than your eye. But your eye is important. I want you outside, under dark skies, counting stars. That's a really good activity. But if you want to buy one for your organization or yourself, you go to Agena Astro Comm. There are $155. A great investment, I have to say. And so this is last year's US data set for the globe at night process. And the darker the dot, the darker the sky. You can see there's lots of dark dots out west. Let's see what we got around here. Hmm hmm. Yeah. We're here. It's a dot there. There's two in Hamilton, north east corner, one over a couple in that. You know, I gave this talk in early 2025 to the Essex Greenbelt Group, and I gave them the same challenge. You're going to go outside and make these measurements and add them to the database. Two people listen to me. So when I come back here in a year to celebrate the outdoor lighting bylaw that you have just passed. I want to see this. This map lit up with measurements that you have made at that website global.

01:08:43,289	S2:
In some folks in summary really won't rap out here is not to eliminate lights, but to light when you need it, where you need it, and adjust the amount necessary because anything else is wasted. Here's how you get Ahold of me. Thank you very much for coming tonight.

01:09:04,569	S5:
Thank you. I think I've left.

01:09:06,729	S2:
Like roughly 15 minutes for questions because we got to be out here not long after 730. So raise your hand if you've got a question, and I'll repeat it so that everything, including the cameras, can hear it. Oh, come on, let's play stumpy astronomer. Go ahead.

01:09:21,449	S4:
So I've been reading recently about and just not deeply. I've just looked at headlines about a company that is going to try to get a permit to reflect the sun during night and turned night on during the day for paying customers, right?

01:09:42,850	S2:
This is called reflect orbital reflective orbital.

01:09:49,569	S4:
Right.

01:09:50,729	S2:
So so the thing is, clearly no one who knows anything about orbital mechanics had anything to do with that. It's I don't get all wound up about that, because physically, it's pretty much impossible to do what they're proposing to do because there's this little thing called the inverse square law. Some of you know this. If I have a light away from my hand here and I double the distance, the intensity of the light is reduced by a factor of four. Okay. And so in order for these things to work at all, they have to be pretty close to the earth. And two things happen when a satellite is pretty close to the Earth. First of all, you can only see it when the sun is shining on it and that low down. Most of the night it's in shadow. And the second thing is that high up, even though you're outside, what you think is all of the atmospheric, atmospheric drag will still take these big sails and drag them back, and they won't be able to stay in orbit. You, I'm sure, have heard of Starlink satellites. Now they're falling out of the sky by the dozens every month because they're reentering the atmosphere. The atmospheric drag is getting on them. So yes, it's scary. Yes, astronomers are worried and saying so, but I don't see it being realistically a possibility. I just don't. But thank you for that. You can say Kelly told you it was okay.

01:11:22,130	S6:
What institutions do you think are the most effective to target? Did I assume that individual businesses probably look to subcontractors for lighting effectiveness and what to go for? Is it through the those fires that sell lighting to the contractors and developers that build these things?

01:11:37,770	S2:
A great question, he says. How can I be most effective? Who do I see to have the greatest impact? Well, here in your town, I would start with your planning board. And I know we have at least one planning board member here when a new project comes into town. You know, it's all. The truth is that it's much harder to replace a light that's already installed. It's much easier to take care of a light before it's installed, and have it be the right light from the first time. So when you're when a developer comes before your planning board, you know, encourage the planning board to ask for a lighting plan, what's called a lighting plan. It's what the architect will have to give you to show what lights of what strength and what model are going where. And if you want to get really fancy, you can ask for a a a Isotope map, which takes the and this is possible to do. You take those lights and it draws contours on the ground of how much light is falling, where. The second thing I would do is contact your building commissioner. And because because what happens is think about this. Lots of lights get installed on homes and buildings and they never, ever appear before the planning board. But they do have to pull an electrical permit, maybe. And so that is another way to catch some of the low hanging fruit of of catching lighting before it's installed, and at least encouraging, if not demanding that that light be dark sky compliant. When we say dark sky compliant, the two things you ask for is full shielding and the low color temperature, right? So locally, that's what I would do. Um, I'm thinking that, uh, Anne and Cathy will be heading out and trying to talk because you don't have a lighting ordinance yet. Trying to talk to some of the businesses. Point them at this, which is going to be on your on your cable TV website and say, please take an hour to watch this and let's work together to to make your lighting better, not eliminate it, just making it better. So those are the three things I'd suggest doing here if you want to get, uh, elevated to another level. Uh, we have these bills in the legislature right now which are stuck. Um, I will you give you some inside your information here. Uh, our lighting bill, I have been we've been submitting it pretty much the same every year for 20 years. Uh, it would require state and municipally funded lighting projects to be fully shielded and have low color temperatures. That's about it. Not a whole lot of of asks there. It wouldn't affect residences, it wouldn't affect businesses because it's just state and municipally funded. Uh, and so, um, it's been stuck. It's been stuck mostly in the Ways and Means Committee. And this is how dysfunctional our legislature is today. Today, our bill was supposed to be on the floor of the Senate, debated as an amendment to a big bill, uh, called the energy bond bill that has to pass. And before we could before the senators could vote on it, it became known that the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which we've talked to many times, decided that they were going to oppose this bill. They spoke to the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and miraculously, our our amendment was withdrawn, had to be withdrawn because the the all powerful hierarchy of the Senate. We're going to vote against it. So it's a long road to try to get there. But if you want, go to the mass legislature's website. Look up dark Sky Bill. That's what everybody knows it by all of the rank and file members of the House and Senate that we talked to. They're in favor of it. It's just the top elite officers of the legislature. And you've heard this before. They're not warm and friendly people, but. So. Yes. Go ahead.

01:15:56,060	S6:
Um, but from what you described, most people would be in favor of this. There's not a lot of cost associated. So what is the problem?

01:16:04,619	S2:
I don't.

01:16:05,100	S5:
Know.

01:16:05,819	S2:
His question is there's no cost associated. You're absolutely right. It would cost your town if they were to replace the street lights tomorrow. It would cost your town not a dime more to put in well shielded, low temperature streetlights then? Alternatives. There's no cost. We're not forcing them to do that. There's no like retroactive this. It's new and replacement installations. I don't know what the problem is. And I think it's the RMA. The mass Municipal association is opposed to anything that creates new regulations for the towns, and they're opposed to it sort of unilaterally. And yet if you go to the MMA website, you will find a best practices document. Which step for step matches our bill that they issued about three years ago to all the towns. If you want to do outdoor lighting and here are the best practices, here are the guidelines we suggest you follow. It just doesn't make sense to me. Anybody else?

01:17:11,350	S4:
What's your thought on the use of solar lights? You know, a lot of people have solar landscaping lights.

01:17:17,109	S2:
Her question is, what do I think about solar lighting?

01:17:21,750	S2:
Fortunately for now, the lights like you get that have solar cells on them are low intensity and they're used primarily for what we call wayfinding. They're put alongside your your walkways. Maybe they have a there's a string of them that you have on your back porch, you know, or in your, in your recreation area outside. But that's not the low hanging fruit. And so those are really they are they are undoubtedly creating a certain amount of light pollution. But they're just the tiny there's so many other things that are important. It's interesting. Um, a week from.

01:18:09,350	S2:
Next Monday, a week from Monday. A week from Monday. Chelmsford will vote on an outdoor lighting bylaw that I wrote And it's going to be a general bylaw, not a zoning bylaw, which is more typical. And a general bylaw allows you to declare all non all bad lights are nonconforming and then I give ten years to replace them. All right. It's a grace period. And so the catch here is that in in the time that we've had a bylaw in Chelmsford which is from the year 2000, untold number of really bad LEDs have been installed in violation of the old bylaw. So I feel I'm on pretty solid ground here when I say you got to change your light right within this ten year period, because right as of now it's non-conforming. So wish me luck. Uh, it's, uh, you can check it out. It's it's will be one of the first one of the first, uh, articles. This is the 27th. Go to Chelmsford TV, our cable access group. and and you can watch me wither and or cheer or whatever. Anybody else?

01:19:24,630	S5:
Yes.

01:19:25,350	S1:
I'm thinking about the issue of safety. And you pointed out a couple of times how, um, what people think. Lights provide in terms of safety is really illusory and maybe even counterproductive. Um, and I'm just wondering if, um, you know, as as we think about talking to, uh, businesses, I'm anticipating that the safety issue is going to be raised a great deal. Right. And I'm, um, I'm just sitting here thinking about the fact that you can have so many other kinds of sensors to, to to alert you to the presence or interruption something sound bells, you know, computer, whatever. Right.

Um. 01:20:10,310	S2:
Why tripwires? That's a good.

01:20:11,829	S6:
One.

01:20:12,869	S1:
I on on mine. And where is their research about?

01:20:16,000	S2:
Okay. Great question Kathy. Kathy's question is for businesses. They're obsessed with security. And so that's one of the reasons they have so much light. Ask your business when you go up to them. Show me in your insurance policy where it says you have to light anything. They can't. I've talked to I've talked to insurance underwriters for commercial businesses. The policies don't say anything about lighting up your parking lot or your business. Obviously it makes sense. You don't want to be broken into and that helps as a deterrent. But in terms of increasing your liability. Uh, the, uh, the the convenience store that turns off all its lights. Uh, their liability is not increased. In our in Chelmsford, the Walgreens shuts off its lights completely at night and its parking lot. The CVS does not. You know, I'm not picking sides here, but it's just it's just a reality. And so I would say to those businesses, if they've got LED Street that are not wall packs, because when they're slapped on firmly attached, there's not a lot that can be done with those. But if they're on pivots, say try it. Just try turning them down. This goes for all of you and anybody you know who's got one of these backyard security lights. They're all on pivots. Try turning them down. See if you like the outcome. If you don't point it back up, though, I hope you don't. But it costs you nothing to try to do it the right way. All right, folks, listen, I'll leave a little time. I'll be in the back there with the telescope, checking it out. Thank you again for coming. Please support your group here. Um, as you can see, there's a lot at stake. And, uh, with many voices, it becomes an easier lift. Thank you. And good night.