Amazon Is Going to Fill the Sky With Satellites. Astronomers Aren’t Happy“BlueWalker was a shock to us as to how bright it was. We are also very worried about the impact to radio astronomy,” since one of its downlink frequencies is next to a protected radio band at 42.5-43.5 gigahertz, says John Barentine, one of the study’s coauthors and a conference attendee. A Tucson, Arizona-based astronomer, he is also the executive officer of Dark Sky Consulting, which advises companies and government officials on outdoor lighting to preserve dark night skies.
The Loss of Dark Skies Is So Painful, Astronomers Coined a New Term for ItGiven the harmful effects of light pollution, Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist at the University of San Francisco, and John Barentine, astronomer and science communicator at Dark Sky Consulting, have coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.*
A Bay Area Community Wants to Protect Its Dark SkiesA study released this year, based on observations from around the world, found the number of visible stars to be decreasing by about 10 percent a year because of the increasing use of artificial light. At that rate, half of the stars that are visible when a child is born will be obscured by light pollution when the child turns 18, said John Barentine, an astronomer and former director of public policy for the International Dark Sky Association. Barentine emphasized that we’re only beginning to understand the full impact of light pollution, which has been shown to harm wildlife, including the pollinating insects we rely on for our food supply. “I do think this is one of the most significant environmental problems of our time that almost nobody knows about,” he said. |
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