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I flew through the night to Singapore once. I remember two very striking light sources. Firstly, oil well flares in the Middle East. The oil fields are in the
by twic 7y ago
I flew through the night to Singapore once. I remember two very striking light sources.
Firstly, oil well flares in the Middle East. The oil fields are in the middle of nowhere, so they're these huge orange-red blooms set in utter darkness.
Secondly, Delhi. The city is brightly lit with streetlights. But there's a suburb (?) to the south, Faridabad, that's as brightly lit, but with a different, whiter, kind of lights. So you had these two huge blotches of yellow and blue light projecting into each other. There are also some extremely bright areas to the south of the city - after some investigation, I decided they were probably rock-crushing plants.
- 3JPLW 7y agoChicago has been slowly replacing its yellow sodium streetlamps with efficient LEDs that project down instead of up. They've been working block-by-block in a systematic way that you can see when you fly into the city at night. It's quite dramatic.
- paulie_a 7y agoDid Chicago figure out the issue with LEDs and snow. The old lights melted snow, the LED lights did not
- jschwartzi 7y agoChicago plows.
- ceejayoz 7y agoSnow on the lights, not the roads. I discovered LED headlights on cars don’t melt off the ice like incandescent do the last time I drove in an ice storm.
- reaperducer 7y agoThe LED and snow issue is about traffic lights, which are horizontal and therefore subject to getting filled with blowing snow. Streetlights face down and don't have a cavity to fill with snow.
- abrowne 7y agoWe've been getting LED street lights in Minneapolis, so can't be a problem now.
- maxerickson 7y agoMy town replaced the sodium light across the street with a LED. A lot more light comes in the windows now. It sucks.
- astura 7y agoYou can't use blackout curtains?
- maxerickson 7y agoNot the point. The light is far enough away from the windows that there is zero reason for it to shining on them.
- zimpenfish 7y agoI saw one that was relatively close to an old house's window and it had a backplate installed which I thought was most kind. (Somewhere around Peckham, I've a feeling near Sceaux Gardens, IIRC.)
- Shivetya 7y agoSame with my subdivision, the local power company made a pass a few years ago and replaced every other street lamp with a LED. They also took the old larger lens covers to. The first observation was the it was like living with nearly a full moon out all the time; this increased after all lights were replaced. They produce very clean light which appears to reflect more than the old orange light color. the second was that birds in my front holly bushes and thuja trees took some time adapting to the newly lit world; at first they sang/chirped at night hours. LED lights are amazing for efficiency to the point light pollution will increase simply because it cost so little to keep the lights on; I know I am guilt of that around Christmas as I run nearly five hundred feet of LED lighting then and don't even see the effect on my bill
- lb1lf 7y agoSame goes for Berlin[0] - where the eastern districts are still predominantly sodium-lit, whereas whiter lights are used in the western part. [0] https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/you-can-see-berlin-s-east-west-divide-space-886 https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/you-can-see-berlin-s-eas... Edit: As I continued farther downthread, I saw that this had already been mentioned; my apologies.
- mattkrause 7y agoPrudhoe Bay at the top of Alaska must be something like that, because it's bigger than many major cities.
- salgernon 7y agoI was looking around in that area (on the maps) and apparently its an oil field kind of thing. Reading up on it, there's restrictions on being able to actually access the ocean from that location - concerns about security, I guess. I thought an interesting nearby spot (east of Prudhoe Bay) was Cape Parry Bird Sanctuary. On the west side there was a military base that had since been decommissioned and what looks like an abandoned airstrip. But it still is bright for that area. Apple Maps shows more detail for that location; maps.google.com didn't have very high resolution imagry.
- paulie_a 7y agoBased on the color of light you can see where east and west Berlin were. The east used gaslamps
- techie128 7y agoSame thing with Berlin. West Berlin has a whiter glow while East Berlin is yellowish. Relevant: https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/you-can-see-berlin-s-east-west-divide-space-886 https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/you-can-see-berlin-s-eas...