January 28th, 2008
Now there’s nowhere left to go, except for remote mountain tops in Chile or Hawaii — or outer space. McDonald Observatory in West Texas once enjoyed the darkest night skies in the country. But sky glow from El Paso-Juarez, 175 miles away, now dominates the western horizon. After the full moon, it’s the brightest thing in the night sky, says Bill Wren, assistant to the observatory’s superintendent.
Wren spends most of his time preaching the dark-sky gospel to civic groups, local government agencies, and whomever else will listen.
“They think I’m there to talk them into turning their lights off,” he says. “That’s simply not true. We need light as much as the next guy to walk from place to place. Instead of being against outdoor lighting, we are for good outdoor lighting. It’s a win-win situation.” The observatory even has a fund available to help counties and municipalities replace old fashioned light-wasting fixtures.
To reclaim the night sky, not just for astronomers but for everybody, is the mission of the 11,000-member International Dark-Sky Society, which founder Dr. David Crawford says, likes to think of itself a kind of Sierra Club of the night.
By the late 1960s, the night glow was creeping across the sky from Tucson, some 56 miles away from Kitt Peak Observatory, where Crawford was working as an astronomer. “I felt something had to be done about this,” he says.
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