Saturday, April 30, 2011

Dark Skies


All Transylvania Gentlemen (and ladies) are urged to join us in supporting The International Dark-Sky Association, a noble unit devoted to decreasing human-generated electic light pollution at night. As their website puts it:

Once a source of wonder--and one half of the entire planet’s natural environment—the star-filled nights of just a few years ago are vanishing in a yellow haze. Human-produced light pollution not only mars our view of the stars; poor lighting threatens astronomy, disrupts ecosystems, affects human circadian rhythms, and wastes energy to the tune of $2.2 billion per year in the U.S. alone.



But most importantly, perhaps, our interest in their efforts are twofold:

For one, we prefer a night sky uncluttered by electric lighting because, simply, that's the way things used to be and is therefore better.

And secondly, because light pollution clouds out the details of the night sky and tends to make it easy to forget that we're actually standing on a tiny rock hurtling through outer space on the edge of a giant galaxy that itself is speeding at unfathomable speeds through an infinite Universe. We don't want people to forget that - we want them to be more cognizant of it than ever.

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