light pollution

Have you ever looked up and wondered where all the stars have gone and why the sky looks so dull. 

I like to spend most of my nights gazing up at the stars. But every time I found the sky empty, a strange and incomprehensible sadness filled my heart. 

While researching this post I stumbled upon a term called 'Noctalgia'. This term is used to describe the feeling of sadness or longing for the dark skies. 

Now, we don't get to see dark skies anymore due to light pollution. Light pollution is caused by excessive and inefficient use of artificial light.

According to Wikipedia, about 83 per cent of the human population lives under light-polluted skies. 

To make matters worse, light pollution has increased by 49 per cent from 1992 to 2017. 49 per cent!

Light pollution might seem like a small stargazing-related problem but it is way worse than that. 

First, let's talk about the impacts of light pollution on human health. Light pollution causes headaches, constant fatigue, stress and anxiety. Some studies have even shown that light pollution causes severe diseases like breast and prostate cancer. 

Light pollution does not just harm human health but also animals and plants. 

Many animals rely on moonlight to navigate paths for migration. Artificial light at night (ALAN) can confuse them.

ALAN leads to hormonal imbalances and affects sleep cycles in animals.

In plants, ALAN disrupts their photoperiod (the amount of sunlight a plant receives during a 24-hour period). This further disturbs photosynthesis.

As I have mentioned before, ALAN also affects star gazing as we cannot see the galaxies and the stars anymore.  ALAN also makes it harder to see further astronomical events which can be really helpful for new discoveries.

We just talked about the impacts of light pollution, but what about the steps we can take to reduce and limit it.

As individuals, can obviously reduce the use of artificial light unnecessarily and switch off the light when not in use.

But we would need to use them after all. So we can use efficient LED lights that direct light downwards. We can use warm tones of lights instead of the blue ones. When we switch the lights in our rooms, we can put on our curtains to prevent a lot of light from going out of the room.

Some communities measure, we can take our educate, the public about, like pollution And its negative impacts.

We can encourage dark sky parks where there is less lighting and people can come and enjoy the dark skies. This one would be hard but really helpful in the long run. 

One measure that authorities can take is to set timers on the street lights. And for the dark sky parks, I talked about earlier, the government can provide funds for that too. 

I hope you like this post if you have any questions or want me to write about any other topic, comment down below. I will meet you guys next Sunday.

Thanks for reading!!