Waking Kids Up (to the night sky)
Dark sky awareness and our youth can and do go together! The time is now to get our youth involved in campaigns to prevent and hopefully reverse some of the damage we are doing to the night sky. I am in the fortunate position to interact with our youth on a day to day basis, as I teach six astronomy classes per day in a Texas public high school. The number of students that sign up for the course continues to grow each year and it is because they want to know the night sky. This affords an opportunity to...
Is light pollution for the birds? Not all of them. Read this 5th grader's research that won him 1st place in a regional science fair
My name is Ty Pham-Swann and I created a dark sky project that won a first place prize at the Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair (SARSEF). I’m a 5th grade student at Canyon View Elementary in Tucson. My project’s title was, “Does the light in the night sky affect night birds?” I did this project because I’ve always been interested in wildlife and people, and because I was curious about light pollution in the night sky. I also thought that my project would be different than most others at the science fair, and I was right! Ty with...
Arguing for Full Moon Level Lighting
I am a firm believer in sales. Sales are what make the world go round – well, the business world, certainly, but what many people don't realize is that they are in sales even if they don't hold the title of “salesperson.” But to the point: Any good salesperson knows that logic does not drive sales; what does matter is something deeper and 'gut-level' for humans: Emotion. Yes, humans buy things based on emotion. I know you think you “need” that Televue eyepiece, but you also know that you really don't, you just want it. A lot. (And that's okay)...
LIGHTING MYTHS
INTRODUCTION Amateur astronomers and sky observers worldwide trying to reduce light pollution and improve the night sky in their communities often come across a variety of objections, which are usually based on inaccurate facts, misconceptions or, at times, deliberate falsehoods. I call these "lighting myths." THE MORE LIGHT THE BETTER "The more light the better" is the same type of reasoning as saying the more salt on your food the better, or the more medicine the better. Obviously, there comes a point where you can have too much of a good thing. Nighttime lighting behaves in the same way. We...
Globe at Night Campaigns for Middle School Students
Problem: No budget for field trips, so how to bring real science into the lives of my students? Solution: Globe at Night campaigns! I teach 8th grade science at Pistor Middle School and this is the first year I have successfully involved student citizen scientists in the Globe at Night campaign. I’d tried before, but this time I offered extra credit as an incentive and that seemed to do the trick. Interestingly, many of the students who eventually did observations were in no need of extra credit; they weren’t averse to the idea of extra credit of course, but they...
