The American Medical Association has officially warned about the danger that excessive night lighting poses to our health, citing a growing body of medical research on the subject.

​The International Dark-Sky Association, based in Tucson, praised the AMA action. “We’ve been sounding the alarm on this, basically, for the last six years,” said John Barentine, an IDA project manager.

​“The weight of the evidence has been mounting. We just see more and more studies that confirm it,” Barentine said. “This is deep, deep physiology.”

A smattering of crisp white clouds lingers west of Grand Canyon National Park. ... If you say here on a moonless night like this and counted through dawn, you could tally thousands of stars.

"The place you are in is special -- keep that in your mind -- in contrast to the places that most of live," says International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) astronomer John Barentine, who manages the Dark-Sky Places Program. "Every human being once shared this experience of looking up into the night sky and seeing it filled with stars."

"The human brain saw patterns in those stars. And we translated all of our human hopes and our fears and our dreams and our worries onto those stars," says Barentine. The natural night sky inspires."

Astronomers have complained about excess light as early as the late 1800s, when some of the first streetlamps began to significantly obscure the night sky. But recently the problem has grown so bad it has inspired a movement of astronomy nerds, amateur stargazers, and wilderness lovers rallying to preserve darkness. 
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“It’s not like air pollution or water pollution where you can stop the polluting but it takes a while for the environment to flush the pollutant out,” says John Barentine, a bespectacled astronomy PhD and program manager for the International Dark-Sky Association, an Arizona-based non-profit. “It’s literally something where if we wanted to, we could change it overnight.” 

Stargazers from around the globe gathered at the Grand Canyon this week to gander upon our galaxy’s grandeur. The national park is hosting its annual star party, an eight-night event inviting the public to observe the heavens free from blinding city lights and street lamps.

“As the sky gets darker after sunset you start to notice something on the eastern horizon that at first you think are storm clouds,” said John Barentine, an astronomer and program manager at the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit group that raises awareness to light pollution. “Then as it gets darker you realize they aren’t clouds in our atmosphere, but they are glowing clouds of stars.”

What he and thousands of visitors witnessed was a sight hidden to many: The Milky Way.

Regional media in Okinawa documented my visit to Ishigaki City on Monday, 30 May 2016. All websites below are in Japanese.

Ryukyu Shimpo (Okinawa)
Yaeyama Nippo (Ishigaki)
Yaeyama Mainichi (Ishkigaki)
Okinawa Times (Okinawa)