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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

I headed to a semi-dark site not far from home (I live in Sunnyvale, California) for which I have a night permit - Montebello OSP.

You need a permit to take pictures of the sky?

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It’s a very popular observation spot and permits try to manage its overuse. Errant car headlights can spoil an observation, the area caters to enthusiasts that follow a slew of best practices (only using red flashlights in the dark to preserve night vision, etc).

http://www.stlplaces.com/night_vision_red_myth/

Isn’t the red light preserving night vision a myth?

From my experience it works. Sometimes I wonder if it works mainly because most red lights are pretty dim.

Reducing blowout by 2/3rds of the spectrum (or more) seems like a good thing. I don't get the "myth" people. Maybe they just prefer blue or green dim lights?

Historically it's got some influence from black and white photography, where black and white film was typically least sensitive to the red spectrum and sometimes not sensitive at all, giving a small frequency window where one could operate in a "dark" room without exposing the film the photographer was working with, because the human sensitivity to red is many times better than the film's sensitivity to red.

With digital it seems almost the opposite way. When you lightpaint with red even barely perceptible light has a huge effect compared to other colors. Blue for example doesn't register much in comparison.

That location is normally open between sunrise and sunset. I assume the permit allows access all night.

Land of the free.

Free to observe the night sky without someone else trampling on that freedom

As long as you have a night sky observation permit.

The United States has serious problems with bean counter overreach: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/0...

Meanwhile the conservative politicians keep talking incessantly about deregulation, but it seems like it only applies to specific regulations that are inconvenient to friends of their, instead of actually attacking the deep cultural problem American society has with bureaucratic overreach. For goodness sake, a lot of actual dictatorships will meddle less in your personal business than the United States.

Would you mind naming 2 of those dictatorships and perhaps explain what metric you used to arrive at your conclusion?

The US has also a problem with private overreach as in rich property owners closing off huge areas of land completely. This is a huge problem in the west if you do any hiking. In Germany or Britain there usually is a path through but in the US they just close it off.

Really? You have a problem with a specific site being set aside for night time astronomical observation?

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially not flamebait. Turning a thread about astrophotography into a garden-variety political flamewar, as you do here and downthread, is vandalism on this site.

We ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and have already had to warn you again recently, so would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide more scrupulously by the rules from now on?

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