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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I think it's time to introduce fines for office buildings that are unoccupied overnight, but have lights on. Certainly in high rise towers this would be tens of thousands of lights.

More stars, less energy consumed. Win, win.

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Slovenia is one of the few countries that has legislation against light pollution. For example, all outdoor lights must only emit towards the ground. It helps a lot with dark skies, but enforcing this kind of rules can be a problem in many cases.

http://artificiallightatnight.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/0/5/370...

THIS so much - Most of the public lights emit in +-all directions, making them not only uneffective but constant light polluters at the same time. And it would be so simple - reflect to the ground, say with 170° angle.

this would make the usual 'light cloud' over towns and villages practically disappear. I guess this is a remainder from times where the more light there was, the better (ie look at our mighty civilization and its advances, illuminating whole valleys and soon whole earth!). Now it makes it pretty hard to find unpolluted places in western Europe even in the Alps.

I can be in the Italian side of the alps, and I still get orange blobs from Switzerland or France, even across continuous wide range of frikkin' 4000m peaks!

Reflecting to the ground is helpful, but it definitely wouldn't make the light pollution disappear. Plenty would bounce off lightly-colored pavement and back into the sky.

Interesting. My hometown in Austria recently installed new lampposts; and all of them are downward-facing. I don't know if this was a conscious decision to reduce light pollution, but it worked wonders. The roads are better lit than before, while there is almost no glare from afar and the night sky is much more visible.

The problem is so much bigger than that. Here in Edmonton, we have regular folks who campaign and crowd-source funding to install lights on bridges, buildings, just about anything for the sake of making things look 'nicer'. Which is unfortunate for those of us who want to see the sky.

Anyway, how's the light pollution been on your Africa trip? You must have been through some seriously dark remote areas by now.

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