Army of Darkness

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe — the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

- Immanuel Kant



For as long as humans have had stories, we have had stories about the stars.

The Mayans, for instance, thought of the Milky Way as the road by which souls traveled to the underworld.

The ancient Greeks wrote epics of the shapes they saw in the stars — Orion, the great hunter; Andromeda, whose beauty prompted a war; and Pegasus, the flying horse, winging forever toward heaven.

The Pawnee Indians, who lived east of this area before white settlers arrived, believed the creator-god Tirawa gave the stars the job of supporting the sky. Certain stars were in charge of the clouds, wind and rain. But lesser stars grew jealous of these bright, caretaker stars, and found a sack of storms entrusted to the brighter stars to create Earth’s weather.

They emptied the sack, loosing violent storms upon the Earth. The Pawnee believe this is how Death came to the world.

Christians may think of these beliefs, which are catalogued at the Boulder-based University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, as pure mythology. But they, too, have a star story. Some modern astronomers believe the Star of Bethlehem, used by the Magi to find the infant Jesus, was actually a supernova.

Today, two-thirds of the world no longer sees the sky of our ancestors. It is disappearing at an Amazonian extinction rate — in fact, by some estimates, a purely dark, virgin sky may disappear entirely from the lower 48 states by 2025.

There’s a lot to be lost, even by people who live in brightly lit cities and sleep through the night.

Half of Earth’s creatures are nocturnal, and a bright night interrupts their natural rhythms. In a famous example, baby sea turtles use reflected moonlight and starlight to find the water after they hatch. City lights lead them the wrong way.

In Colorado, bobcats and owls are among creatures impacted by the haze caused by artificial light, known as light pollution.

A study published last week shows polarized light, which can be reflected off dark surfaces in bright cities, disorients water-seeking insects and their predators, resulting in “ecological traps.”

The news is not much better for humans. In one study, light at night was linked to colorectal cancer in women; Harvard researchers believe light disrupts the production of melatonin, a cancer suppressing agent.

Beyond physical health, the night sky is a spiritual gift — who hasn’t marveled at the majesty of a velvet sky dotted with stars?

For centuries, the night sky was the single greatest motivation for scientific discovery. Copernicus believed the planets revolved around the Sun; Galileo looked to the skies and proved it.

Modern cosmologists who seek answers to dark energy and a theory of everything are able to question the universe because they can see what’s in it.

Though separated by oceans of distance and belief, we all sleep beneath the same stars. They unify us in common heritage, and remind us that we are not alone.

If we can no longer see them, will we cease to wonder at them?

“I think it’s just a human need, to feel connected and peaceful by being able to look up at the night sky and see the stars,” said Andrea Schweitzer, a Fort Collins astronomer who is the U.S. project manager for the International Year of Astronomy. “That’s inspired art and poetry and, I think, just contemplation throughout human history.”

In the October skies over Fort Collins, I sought that inspiration.

***

If you stare for a few minutes, it’s amazing how many stars wink into the night sky.

The Milky Way is there; a dusty, dim band stretches from the northwest, though it fades as it crosses the city.

A few degrees west of the zenith is Andromeda, and if you know where to find her famous galaxy, you can discern its faint, oblong fuzz.

On an especially clear night, like the evening the National Park Service’s dark sky guru measured Fort Collins’ dark sky pulse, the sky is inkier than may be expected in a city.

But it’s not dark enough for people like Chad Moore.

He directs the park service’s Night Sky Program, spending much of our sleeping hours bundled in a parka, hovering over a laptop and camera, measuring how city lights mask the stars.

He moved to Fort Collins last summer when the Night Sky program was adopted by the park service’s Natural Resource Program Center, based on the Colorado State University campus.

Moore is well known among an army of researchers fighting to save the darkness.

They include medical researchers, naturalists, ecologists and astronomers, who collectively believe the loss of dark skies is a threat to human and wildlife health, scientific knowledge and the human spirit.

They have been making some progress, according to research gathered at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder.

Though light pollution is a growing environmental problem, it’s one of the easiest to reverse.

But as Moore points out, there’s a lot of work to do — and this year, the International Year of Astronomy, the fighters are hoping to gain legions of new supporters.

***

One of the biggest obstacles for dark-sky advocates is convincing people that darker is better. Light makes us feel safe and warm; light-polluting incandescent bulbs remind us of the Sun because they, like the Sun, give off heat as well as light.

But contrary to popular assumption, downward-directed gas-based lights are actually safer than bright behemoth lampposts that illuminate an entire parking lot. Bright lights cause shadows and force a person’s pupils to restrict, making everything appear darker. What’s more, wasted light is also wasted energy.

Instead, residents can install alcove or eave fixtures, which direct light toward the ground instead of the sky, and they can use low-wattage fluorescent bulbs. Cities and states can use high-pressure sodium lights rather than mercury-vapor ones; the Colorado Department of Transportation has been praised for its use of such lights. The International Dark Sky Association, a 20-year-old nonprofit fighting to save the dark, even keeps a list of dark-sky approved fixtures and retailers.

“What we’re proposing is not a far-out concept. It’s not as experimental as some people think,” Moore said.

We parked at a trailhead along Horsetooth Reservoir, where a sign told us we were on the Foothills Trail.

Walking on a dirt trail full of rocks in the darkness, even while carrying a heavy tripod, was easier than one might expect. Moore wasn’t surprised, however.

“We’re taught from a young age that cats can see well in the dark, owls can see well in the dark, but humans, we’re just evolutionary losers,” he said. “But if there’s any kind of moonlight, humans have no trouble seeing, particularly in open country.”

We quickly found a flat spot that would accommodate Moore’s dark-sky measuring equipment. It consists of a camera used for astrophotography, mounted on a star-finder sold with a popular brand of amateur telescopes, and connected to a laptop. Moore keeps the computer warm with a piece of aluminum foil.

He set it up swiftly, working with a small flashlight between his teeth.

“After so many nights, this is very natural,” he said.

It ought to be for the person who designed the system and the program that supports it. Moore created the dark-sky program nine years ago.

Though he volunteered at a planetarium in high school and has long been an amateur astronomer, Moore came to the job in a roundabout way. He has a master’s degree in earth science and worked in general services for the NPS, including studying rock falls and air quality. Anything that neither breathed nor grew was his subject.

He later realized that includes the night skies.

“I just kept asking, ‘What do we do about light pollution?’ And people kept saying, ‘When you find out, let me know,’” he recalled. “I thought, ‘This is really the universe telling me that it’s got to be me.’”

He recruited a friend and they agreed to spend two weeks a year measuring light pollution in national parks. As two weeks grew into four and more, Moore started seeking Park Service grants, pulling together pieces of funding that had been dedicated to other programs.

“I felt pushed to do it. Everywhere I went, people were like, ‘Oh, that's so cool, you need to come visit us,’” he said.

His interest led to a research program, still ongoing, to gauge light pollution in national parks. It spawned ranger-led programs about night skies, which became the most popular programs at many parks, including Yellowstone and Bryce Canyon. By 2004, his work morphed into a full-time job.

As he set up the computer, our eyes continued adjusting and we noticed the light dome from Denver across the southern sky, drowning out the domes from Boulder and Loveland.

Denver’s light is easily seen from Rocky Mountain National Park, and as far away as Kenosha Pass.

“It almost seems anecdotal, but it feels like in three years, it’s gotten brighter,” Moore said.

In Fort Collins, he estimates 5 percent of the lights account for 20 percent of the light pollution.

***

That number is frustrating for astronomers like Mike Smith, the lead instructor for Earth and Space Sciences at Front Range Community College.

Smith helps run the Stargazer Observatory at Observatory Village, a housing development near Fossil Ridge High School in southeast Fort Collins, and he is watching the night escape him.

Front Range students take astronomy classes at the observatory, which is owned by the neighborhood homeowners’ association.

The observatory’s main attraction is a 14-inch computerized scope, a far cry from the Front Range program’s former setup.

“We had some telescopes and we dragged them out into the parking lot, and that was about the extent of it,” Smith said.

Village Homes, which built the subdivision, contacted Front Range about a partnership, Smith said. The streets have names like Big Dipper Drive and Cassiopeia Lane.

But the neighborhood’s night skies have gotten worse since the observatory opened in 2003, Smith said.

“It’s not as bad as some parts of town, but it’s getting progressively worse with the new Target out there,” Smith said, referring to the Front Range Village development. “It makes me want to cry every time something new gets built out there.”

The good news is that it’s easy to reverse the trend.

Chris Elvidge, lead scientist for the Earth Observation Group at NOAA in Boulder, has seen it happen.

He has collaborated with an Italian astronomer, Fabio Falchi, who conducted a seminal 2001 study that found two-thirds of the world no longer sees a virgin night sky. But Elvidge is optimistic.

He has spent 14 years compiling satellite images of the night sky for a program that started with defense-oriented cloud observations, and he believes the lights of the world are getting dimmer — at least in some spots.

Success stems from awareness. Astronomers, like ecologists, say people will only protect what they love, and they will only love what they understand.

Images from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program help raise that awareness.

Elvidge has seen his program’s images of Earth at night used on CNN, in magazine advertisements and in posters. It’s one of the most instantly recognizable satellite-derived products, with the possible exception of some Hubble Space Telescope screensavers.

“You don’t need to give them very much explanation. They see it, and they go, ‘That's the lights; those are the lights of the world,’” Elvidge said.

And it is a profound sight.

Interstate highways across America are easily recognizable. Lights from Denver and Salt Lake City stand out as oases in a sea of darkness — the kind Moore favors for national parks.

The stretch from New York City to Chicago is awash in light, with the Great Lakes the only blips of blackness. Africa is dark as coal, save for a sprinkle of light in Johannesburg and a few gas flares in Nigeria.

Elvidge said light halos are diminishing across Europe as residents opt for more efficient lighting. In the former Soviet bloc, however, darkness has come with the collapse of the region’s economy. Countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Uzbekistan have been dark for more than a decade.

And then there’s China, where development, and light pollution, continue at an almost blinding pace.

It's not the only place to see an increase in light pollution. Elvidge said in parts of the southern United States, lights have been spreading “pretty much unabated.”

That’s a trend Moore would like to see reversed.

***

Moore set up the NexStar mount, using a global positioning system to tell it our longitude and latitude.

A weather monitoring device told us it was 47 degrees, with 33 percent humidity and a south wind at 6 mph. Moore grew up in Honolulu, but has conditioned himself to the cold temperatures astronomers face in the field.

A computer voice, using an icon of a wizard, reads back the data, and the camera gets to work. It takes 45 images in four rows and then goes straight up. Each image is 24 degrees wide, and the result is a panorama and mosaic of the sky.

The intramural field lights at Colorado State University sear a blinding white into the camera, so painfully bright that we can’t look at it for long.

Car dealerships are a problem, too. Moore sighs as he talks about their wasted light and wasted energy. How good is security, he asks rhetorically, if everybody has to look away because it’s so bright?

“I think most people would be really surprised at this scene we’re looking at. Why are the lights of Fort Collins illuminating the hillsides of Lory State Park and Horsetooth Reservoir?” he said.

He’s careful to say he’s not the one to decide how bright a city should be, or what kind of lights residents should install in their homes. He just wants people to understand the far reach of their choices.

“At what point do people’s personal freedoms in how they light their homes, at what point does it become a community issue?” he said. “At what point do lights ruin the quality-of-life aspect for a city? In the case of Fort Collins, I’m happy to provide data, but that’s not a decision for me to make. But what I would like to point out is the impact on Lory State Park and Rocky Mountain National Park.”

Light spray affects Fort Collins’ natural areas, too, and can result in habitat loss.

“The assumption is that if you keep the houses away and the traffic away, you’ve created a sanctuary,” Moore said. “But if light pollution is disrupting their habitat, you have habitat destruction there, even if there is no ground destruction.”

As the camera whirred away, he pulled out pages of a sky atlas, looking for a constellation in the western sky that would help us determine the depth of the darkness.

We looked at Lyra, the magic harp, and found a magnitude 6.6 star, a very dim star to see without a telescope or binoculars. Moore said it was surprisingly good “seeing,” a term astronomers use, for our site.

Still, astronomers would like it to be even better.

Elvidge’s data shows that humans, at least in developed countries, are getting there.

“Our archive, because it goes back to 1992, is long enough that we’re actually seeing some of the things that you would expect to see if the arguments for energy conservation and preserving the night sky were being picked up and implemented,” he said. “It’s a little light at the end of the tunnel.”

After a few more minutes, Moore and I found M31, the great spiraling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s nearest cousin. It was visible as a minuscule fuzzy smear on the heavens, barely a crumb in the cosmic cookie jar. But I could see it.

The next night, I went to Hubblesite, a Web site maintained by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. I downloaded an image of M31. I made it my Mac’s wallpaper and thought about the telescope’s eponymous astronomer, who loved the stars as he loved Colorado.

“Today we have reached far out into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades … until at the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” Edwin Hubble said. “The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed.”

See the stars Stargazer Observatory at Observatory Village in southeast Fort Collins hosts public open houses the third Sunday of each month. The observatory, which has a rotating dome, features a 14-inch Celestron C-14 telescope connected to a database of more than 30 million pieces of information, including from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and the Hubble Space Telescope Guide Star Catalog. For more information, call Front Range at 970-226-2500. Learn more The International Dark Sky Association Web site has a list of dark-sky approved light fixtures and retailers, as well as advice for homeowners and astronomy enthusiasts. www.darksky.org Connect with local astronomers The Northern Colorado Astronomical Society meets the first Thursday of every month at the Discovery Science Center, 703 E. Prospect. Club business is conducted at 7:15 p.m. and guest speakers present astronomy-related programs beginning at 7:30 p.m. The meetings are free and open to the public.