If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night. Bring binoculars if you have them, maybe get a planisphere and a (dim!) red flashlight.

The lack of respect for the night sky includes starlink and the other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet, by the way. It's been a huge hit to the field of astronomy. Before someone inevitably says "we should just be putting telescopes in orbit", orbital observatories are obviously a huge deal and I support building more of them, but you simply can't put things like the ELT (40m primary mirror, 2800 tonnes) or the Square Kilometre Array in space.

This actually isn’t true. Having done physical security work before, a weird fact is that one of the best physical deterrents is lighting; even over CCTV.

I don’t say that to take away from this, this is great work and I’d love to see the lighting toned down for multiple reasons. However, this should be framed as a security tradeoff not an outright win.

Source: The Impact and Policy Relevance of Street Lighting for Crime Prevention: A Systematic Review Based on a Half-Century of Evaluation Research (https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/wl9zqxga/release/1)

You need much less light on the ground if the eyeball itself has no direct line to the hottest part of the lights. Instead, the night-blindness caused by excessive bare lighting is "fixed" by adding more fill lights for the shadows caused by the first lights. Classic addictive behaviour.

The thing was, the roads of this city were arranged as a footpath, then a grassed area with trees, then the lights, then the roadway. Only after the city had rolled out thousands of these lights did someone notice the footpaths were now much darker. And also the footpaths were quite uneven, due to the trees' roots - a problem the lights had previously been keeping under control.

It's now common, in winter, to see groups jogging on the road.

1. Red light preserves your dark adaptation

2. It doesn't have as much of an impact on your circadian rythm

3. Not using phosphorescence can increase the lifetime of the light, since you don't have to worry about the coating degrading

4. Red light is less energetic, so could potentially use less power.

5. Since an LED without phosphorescence is a single wavelength, telescopes (and binoculars) can use a narrow band filter to filter out the light pollution, without blocking most of the light from celestial objects.

That’s a weird thing to include. That sounds like an argument _for_ more aggressive lights. I didn’t expect to see a “think of the surveillance system”

Dare I argue even I would choose 6500k LED street lights with decent CRI over poor CRI 2700K LED lamps any day.

Having my environment reflect the patterns of nature has really been a nice change.

I have found this not to be the case. They seem to last several years, but not an amazing period of time. Also, the ones that were installed in my home are quite expensive, something like $45 per can (the whole thing must be replaced), and the price to install is $30 per can because the company changed their plug design in the last 5 years. So I end up spending $75 for each light, which is roughly $10 per year per light (per light-year?). That doesn't strike me as a great value, especially because I can't change the lights myself due to the wiring/plug situation. Maybe that piece won't apply in future years, but it's still a lot even if it's just $45 for the darn can.

We started in Tekapo (https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz/) which being rural with a very low population density, and mountainous and with existing observatories to protect

In recent years the effort has moved into the cities (https://www.dunedin.govt.nz/council/policies,-plans-and-stra...)

Interestingly people who live on hills, overlooking the suburbs, complain the lovely view of the sparkling streets was going dark!

But not only does it preserve the stars it is much cheaper, so not going back

Point is: this can be done and the nighttime rewards and financial rewards make it worthwhile

However, I live in a built-up urban area, and my home is absurdly light-polluted. Like, you wouldn't believe it! The parking lot here is ringed with flood lamps that are aimed into our windows. So every hundred feet or so, there is a bright-as-the-Sun lamp in my face, and with a clear view, I can spot about five of them.

So from my balcony, my only hope to get some darkness for the camera is to get into shadows. The railings provide a band of shadows that I can use to block the floods from getting on my lens. So if I position the camera juuust right, it kinda feels darker than it is, and I've got to say I've captured some impressive starfields, down to magnitude 9 or dimmer, including bodies such as Uranus and 4 Vesta.

I also found that the ballcourts in the rear of my property provide this unique "cave" situation with lots of shadows where I can capture the sky directly overhead, and to the west. This is how I photographed the last lunar eclipse.

Now that's my view to the west and 225° (due southwest). If I go on the other side of the property to look east, I've got the same crazy situation with flood lamps, but there's basically no way to hide in shadows. I literally cannot photograph anything rising in the east if it is dimmer than the Moon.

So really, my astronomy hobby mostly consists of doing some great editing, curation, identification, and mostly simulation from the comfort of the air-conditioned indoors. I enjoy what sightings I can while outdoors, and that's included some meteors, the ISS, Tiangong, and a few Vandenberg launches. We're still hanging in there!

tl;dr: Cheap cool-white LEDs cut energy but worsened light pollution; warmer, dynamically dimmable LED fixtures/infra fix it but lower costs tend to win.