Starry, Starry, Starry Night

Rio de Janeiro without any lightsYou may perhaps remember the not so distant time when I was posting astrophotography pictures on this very website. I have also wrote a few times on how we are lighting up our cities too much.

Now a fellow Frenchman, Thierry Cohen, created a series of pictures of what the night could look like if cities like Paris, New York, Shanghai or Sao Paulo were to turn of all their lights. The result is quite stunning.

Not that I am advocating turning off ALL lights at night in our cities, I am just thinking that we should see more stars at night.

While visiting friends last week in the French département of Les Vosges, I drove through a village without any street lights. This left a strange, uncanny and eerie impression on me and I think this village should at least a few lights on to just show that there are still some people alive there…

We have seen here that there are solutions to light up the streets without lightning up the skies. France has recently unveiled measures to save energy that would also help increase the quality of our night skies. Please refer to my recent Cleantechies article for more details.

Back to this series of photographies, I’d like to congratulate Thierry Cohen for his awesome work that combines pictures of dark skies and cities.

Let’s hope we’ll be able one day to rediscover dark skies.

via The New York Times Magazine.

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