Light Pollution

There have not been very many times throughout my three semesters here at UR that I have felt homesick other than the first couple of weeks of school during my freshman year, but there are a few aspects of being away from Maine that trigger a feeling of nostalgia. One aspects in particular crosses my mind more frequently than others, because it happens almost every night when I stop for a moment and pick my head up from looking at the concrete. That is, when I look up at the sky. When I am on campus, and even more so when I am in downtown Richmond, the sky is brightened by a number of stars, but there is still a large amount of dark empty space. The stars that do stand out seem faded to me and produce more of a blurred glow rather than the intensely defined brightness and shine that I have been accustomed to seeing throughout my childhood.

I was fortunate and spoiled enough to grow up in an area that is not very densely populated. Because of this, I was constantly able to look up at the sky at night and see thousands and thousands of stars illuminating the sky, with very few gaps in between. Naturally as a child, I didn’t know that star visibility depended on where you were in the world, and how close to cities you lived. I simply thought that the only time one could not see stars was during nights of overcast. It wasn’t until one of my first family trips to Boston where I realized first hand the effects of light pollution on visibility.

I had a similar experience this past summer while living in Italy for 6 weeks this past summer when I traveled with my summer study abroad group to northern Italy to hike the Dolomite Mountains. We stayed overnight in a lodge about halfway up one of the mountains and all spent the majority of the night outside stargazing. It was truly a unique experience to look not only up, but also straight ahead and see piercing individual lights surround you. It is moments like these that make me wonder what it was like to live in a time where there was no electricity to contribute to light pollution, where the stars acted as our modern streetlights do today.

I have seen firsthand some of the effects of light pollution during an experience when I traveled to Greece my junior year in high school. We spent an afternoon at a sea turtle protection organization and worked to build shelters to help guide newborn sea turtles to the sea. There has been a large issue with newborn sea turtles born on beaches who never make it to the ocean even though they are born less than one hundred feet away because they are attracted to nearby light, and if the amount of light that comes from the cities next to the beach is greater that that of the moon and the stars, the baby sea turtles will navigate away from the water and die before making in to the sea. Light pollution not only reduces the visibility of stars, it also poses a threat to the survival of various species of wildlife.