@spacegeck I’ve never found the Bortle scale particularly useful. Might as well use mag/arcsec2.

A must-read letter by @travislongcore in LRT supporting the use of the term "artificial light".
"Our limitations here are not unrefined language, but the political will to understand and act, and those require plain talk."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14771535241268656

@overcastfm thank you for bringing back streaming! 🙌

Happy Independence Day, America

@JohnBarentine after that, it's all a matter of matching the limits of the protected area to the municipal/county limits to implement outdoor lighting regulations or management plans

@JohnBarentine Having a "large" city like Sherbrooke inside the IDSR might seem weird at first, as it is not "dark", but the whole idea is to include the large sources of light to help reduce light pollution. Simply drawing limits around a dark area would have missed the point.

@JohnBarentine Interesting read, and glad you linked to the paper of light pollution reduction around Mont-Megantic. As I was reading your piece, I kept thinking about how this "lightshed" concept is very similar to how the Mont-Megantic IDSR (and the DarkSky Reserve concept) was built from the start.

@skyglowberlin @JohnBarentine yeah, I know that the use of light (both during and after the construction) is very different between Europe and the US, but even the size of the 2 sites for the factories are very different. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/19ce0o1/tesla_factories_a_scale_comparison_january_2024/#lightbox

@skyglowberlin @JohnBarentine looking at this video posted 2 months ago, there seems to still be a lot of unshielded construction lightson generators used around the factory https://youtu.be/C5gMoN7cVvc?si=s80f7bSLRsipxEzw (also visible in the screengrab from streetview.)

Most of the permanent lights fixtures seem to be shielded according to the drone view.

@YvanDutil

Yesterday, we marked the entry into force of new EU rules to empower consumers in the green transition.

Under those rules, companies will be forbidden to make vague environmental claims, such as stating that they are ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ if
they cannot demonstrate that they truly are.

Consumers will be getting better and more harmonised information on their legally guaranteed rights and on products’ durability and reparability.

Learn more https://europa.eu/!Qmx8jX

#EUdelivers

"Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone"

by Hannah Ritchie from @ourworldindata

https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts?utm_source=OWID+Newsletter&utm_campaign=36ee2980de-biweekly-digest-2024-03-15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2e166c1fc1-3875482ed3-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

#science #dataviz

Here's a recent study from a number of members of the same team, "Artificial light at night is a top predictor of bird migration stopover density": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43046-z

They find that skyglow is the second most positive predictor of birds migratory direction (elevation was the largest).

Forest and landcover had a much smaller impact than skyglow. #Eurodark

An update on protection of Covid vaccination against death and the political partisan gap on US Death tolls (←curves are still diverging)

Later this year, we will add in the new data and make some improvements on the analysis of existing data that we published last year on data up to 2022: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781

Lots has changed since then, especially in Europe... Is light pollution still increasing?

For the results to be reliable, we really need as many people from as many different countries as possible to take part. So please do share the news, and if you have a clear sky, please take part yourself!

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The #GlobeAtNight campaign for March 2024 will run from March 1-10. We urgently need people from around the world to look for #Orion in the sky, and report back what it looks like here: https://globeatnight.org/

Please share with your networks, including off Mastodon!

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#CitizenScience #LightPollution

I've made a website specifically for people in #Toronto / Greater Toronto Area with a couple of maps about the upcoming #SolarEclipse on April 8th. In short: If you're in Toronto and want to see the eclipse, then you'll need to travel.

https://hanno-rein.de/eclipse/

@smorrell totally agree!

@JohnBarentine I was a bit surprise with the phrase « DarkSky has certified more than 160,000 dark sky places across 22 nations, […] »

I had to watch the video to understand that they made a mistake with the total amount of km2 for certified places.

Just imagine reviewing 160,000 applications. No wonder you left that job 😜

Important discovery related to LongCovid: Fragments of SARS-CoV-2 virus can reassemble into "zombie" complexes (XenoAMP-dsDNA) and induce a major and sustained immune response, affecting healthy, uninfected cells, not seen with common cold coronaviruses

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300644120