As you look up into the almost pitch-black sky over West Texas on the clearest of nights, nothing stands between you and the stars glimmering brightly overhead. The sparkling sky offers a surreal experience like no other, a sight that has become increasingly rare because of growing levels of light pollution. To help make the stars at night look big and bright in Texas and across the globe, a passionate movement has grown to reduce the impact of external lighting and raise awareness about the importance of dark skies.
The Dark Skies Initiative began at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory in 2010 with the goal to encourage and educate about conscious lighting decisions for night sky preservation in West Texas and beyond. Dark Skies Initiative coordinator Stephen Hummel says the core of the campaign is helping others understand that there are light pollution solutions that don’t sacrifice safety.
“It’s primarily about bringing attention to this issue,” Hummel says. “I think that really is the main barrier to solving the problem. The solutions are very simple. They’re not typically very expensive or difficult to implement. It’s just a matter
of awareness.”
Research shows that the impact of light pollution runs much deeper than lower visibility. A brighter sky at night that more closely imitates sunlight can disrupt crucial ecological processes such as migration patterns, plant cycles and pollination. Human health is also affected, with an increased risk of breast cancer linked to areas with more artificial light exposure during nighttime.
Solutions often come at little to no cost when treated proactively. According to the initiative’s model, five basic principles outline appropriate outdoor lighting design: ensuring light used has a purpose, shielding light by pointing the source downward, lowering the intensity of light, using light sources with a more amber tone and keeping lights on only when necessary.
“If everyone adopted those practices in a major city, the amount of sky glow the average person sees would be reduced by 80% or 90%,” Hummel says. “If everyone in Austin did that, you wouldn’t have to drive two or three hours … to see the night sky.”
With a focus on the observatory’s immediate region, the Dark Skies Initiative works closely with surrounding communities to ensure residences and businesses follow best practices. Observatory superintendent Teznie Pugh says that without the resounding collaborative effort and willingness from everyone involved to use better lighting, they wouldn’t be where they are today.
“The observatory itself is part of the community,” Pugh says. “You need to really work with your local community to encourage good lighting practices and to maintain the research output and the facility.”
To expand the effort beyond the region, the Dark Skies Initiative joined forces with oil and gas industries in New Mexico earlier this year to bring dark sky efforts across state lines. The recently established Dark for the Park Alliance created a conscious lighting guide, which uses similar guidelines outlined by the McDonald Observatory, for Franklin Mountain Energy facilities to reduce high levels of light pollution near and in the Delaware Basin, which stretches from West Texas into southern New Mexico. Pugh says the collaboration is an important step in tackling the issue.
“Light doesn’t care about borders,” Pugh says. “We might put a state border there, but we can still see (light) from one side of the universe to the other.”
The initiative continues to search for more industry partners and ways to bring light pollution education into new spaces. With the increase in satellites and other space objects that reflect light, pollution has now spread outside the planet’s atmosphere.
“We see these glowing transient issues in the sky from rocket returns, launches and things like that,” Pugh says. “We’re trying to work on how we can either partner with federal agencies or with industries to get an understanding of the objects so that we can avoid pointing our telescopes at them.”
In the meantime, Pugh says that if everyone does one small thing to reduce their lighting footprint, such as switching to dark sky-friendly bulbs or fixtures, the problem is “almost instantaneously fixable.”
“We live in a period, especially since COVID, where there is a lot of catastrophe, and not many of those things are easily fixable,” Pugh says. “You can end up feeling a little stranded as an individual human. But we can all go home and change a light fixture. Just doing that one thing in your own backyard will impact your quality of life and the quality of the ecosystem around you. And if your neighbors do it too, your ability to look at the sky will improve.”
The stars that blanket us are also crucial because of their ability to connect us as humans. The next time you look up at night and see a star, it’s important to appreciate how special it is to have that shared experience, Hummel says. Without initiatives like Dark Skies and others across the world, we risk losing that completely, he says.
“Since before written history, people have looked up to the night sky and had a connection with it,” Hummel says. “Many younger audiences are now losing that connection. We’re losing a bit of our human history and this connection to the grand cosmos. It can be a religious experience or a personal experience. Whatever it is for you, we’re losing touch with that. I think if we lose that, it’s like we’re losing a natural history museum’s worth of information. We’re losing something integral to our history as a society, as people.”
Heading out to West Texas? UT staff, faculty and students get free general admission to the observatory with their current UT ID.
