This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)
As we learn more about #light (especially at night) and human #health, it's becoming apparent that we need more direct #dosimetry of the light exposures people actually get.
“Whether personal light exposure predicts diabetes risk has not been demonstrated in a large prospective cohort. We therefore assessed whether personal light exposure patterns predicted risk of incident type 2 diabetes ... using ∼13 million hours of light sensor data.”
We have the many “correlation” studies, where researchers match ALAN maps from satellite data against the spatial distribution of disease. They try to control for other factors that might influence the incidence of conditions like diabetes and look at what signal remains.
So they use the satellite measurement of ALAN as a proxy to guess at how much (outdoor) ALAN exposure people get. And they tend to find suggestions that the two things are connected.
The Windred et al. paper is one of the first I have seen that tries to measure light exposures directly instead of guessing what they are, and does so with a very large sample size. Their conclusion seems stronger to me, for that reason.
Note: this is still mostly seen in people receiving light indoors. The next frontier is to put wearable devices on people when they’re in outdoor spaces. We would also like to know the color of the light to which they’re exposed, which requires more sophisticated wearable tech.
It's #MilkyWay season again here in the northern hemisphere.
I took this image using my phone last night around 2am looking south from my moderately light-polluted site in east Tucson. 5×90s subs captured in Astroshader were combined in Siril. A final stretch was applied in GIMP.
Further experiments last night. Here, I doubled the total exposure time (so, a total of 900 s). Same processing steps.
Having started in astrophotography about a million years ago using film, it blows my mind that my phone can collect the data used to make an image like this now.
This ensures that more big, bright #satellites are coming: "A Block 1 satellite would have 10 times the capacity of the company’s 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker-3 prototype; [Block2] would be twice as big and have 10 times the capacity of a Block 1 BlueBird." (via @spacenews_inc)
(Also, a reminder that this comms mode is potentially very harmful to ground-based radio astronomy.)
@avirr As do I. But I fear that the Artemis Accords preclude them from doing so. (Not that I find any direct conflict between Artemis and the ZDC, but one is American and the other is European, so...)
@f4grx They seem to have an unjustified belief that tech and capitalism will solve every problem, even if those problems are created by tech and capitalism.
"A bit of me feels that the horse has bolted and we're in catch-up mode at this point."
But: "There's a social good element to what the satellite operators are doing and you've got to balance that against possible impacts to things like radio astronomy."
@BashStKid You're probably right. So far, it's not mainly serving underserved people; rather, I understand that Starlink's lucrative customers are enterprises and militaries.
The #Illinois Responsible Outdoor Lighting Control Act has been passed by the state Senate and House of Representatives. Now it's on to @govpritzker for his signature.
@mgarraha Unfortunately its provisions were eroded away until all that's left is rules that apply only to new installations on lands managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. But it's a point of entry to future negotiations. There are some existing state laws that made it through legislatures (see, e.g., https://www.ncsl.org/environment-and-natural-resources/states-shut-out-light-pollution). Right now there are bills at least in NY and MA, not as sure about others.
@mgarraha Although it didn't happen this year, there is a movement afoot to re-run California AB 2382 from the 2022 session (https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB2382/id/2599697) which the California Assembly passed but Gov. Newsom vetoed as an unfunded mandate. Maybe next year.