Mastodawn

@astrovelo hydrogen is so pretty when it's excited 🙂

Too wound up to go to bed, so I just sent lots of emails to people hoping that they'll spread the word and get lots more people to write comments to the FCC telling them that orbital data centres and sunlight-as-a-service are incredibly stupid, dangerous ideas and should never be launched.

Instructions how to submit here: https://darksky.org/news/two-satellite-proposals-threaten-the-night-sky-the-window-to-act-is-now/

I don't think it'll actually make a big difference. But I do think it's incredibly important that the official record shows how many opposed this.

Satellite proposals threaten the night sky

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…

DarkSky International

BobReflected Feb 14

Last Saturday I spent the day at this year's European Astrofest in London. I learnt a lot, eat too much and tried not to spend a fortune on new toys. These are my reflections on the day ...

https://bobreflected.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-house-of-astronomy-astrofest.html

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BobReflected Feb 14

@NunavutBirder being a grandad is the best job ever 🙂

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BobReflected Feb 12

@BeanThinking lovely to hear from you 🙂
I smiled at the beneficial new ditch story ... a local adaptation in the nearby woodland is to block drainage ditches. The rationale is that the trees will have a better chance of surviving our hotter drier summers if the season begins with 'wet' ground. It makes for more muddy walks however.

I'm pleased for your boots 😉

Yes, despite a month of illness over Christmas, I enjoyed the chance to read. Two books in particular stand out, for different reasons.

BobReflected Feb 11

I've read innumerable books during our long, wet, cloud-covered ongoing winter.

It's always my aim to write a brief review of a book after I finish it - but I now have a daunting backlog, and the compressing greyness has undermined all motivation.

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BobReflected Feb 11

@NunavutBirder thank you for sharing this story. My own grandfather, who lived with us for the later years of his life, lost a leg during that war. His wife died shortly after giving birth to my mother. He, unable to cope, left my mother with a friend's family who raised her - he returned when she was 11 and took her. It was devastating for my mother. War messes lives without mercy.

BobReflected Feb 9

Salva Bará Feb 8

Again and again...

"Overall, the results suggest that switching off public lighting does not have a significant effect on crime"

Chloé Beaudet. Université Paris-Saclay, 2025.

https://pastel.hal.science/tel-05437768v1

Towards Sustainable Lighting : Socio-Economic Analyses of Light Pollution Reduction Policies

This dissertation focuses on the policies implemented by French municipalities regarding public lighting to reduce light pollution, and their socio-economic consequences. It aims to provide new insights for integrating the societal dimension into decision-making on public lighting, a dimension often overshadowed by ecological concerns alone.In the first chapter, we focus on the social acceptability of light pollution reduction policies. Using the case study of the Montpellier metropolitan area, we rely on a discrete choice experiment to evaluate citizens' willingness to pay for three types of policies: reducing light intensity, switching off public lighting, and changing the color of light from white to orange. A latent class model identifies two groups of preferences: one generally favorable to the proposed policies, the other rather unfavorable, particularly toward switching off lighting between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.The second chapter compares two methods for mapping preferences from a discrete choice experiment at a fine spatial scale. We evaluate them in two ways: first through a theoretical case based on Monte Carlo simulations, and then by applying them to the data from Chapter 1 to map preferences at the infra-municipal level. The results show that one of the methods is the most effective, and better captures spatial heterogeneity in preferences.The third chapter develops a decision-support tool for lighting policies in the Montpellier Metropolitan Area, integrating both ecological and societal needs. Two spatial indicators are constructed: an ecological indicator, based on light pollution data and modeling of the needs of six species, and a social acceptability indicator derived from Chapter 2. The combination of these indicators, integrated into an user-friendly application, provides policymakers with a tool to prioritize actions and highlights the importance of adapting lighting policies to local contexts (down to the streetlight) rather than applying a uniform approach.The fourth chapter introduces the construction of a novel database on public lighting switch-off policies in French municipalities with more than 1,500 inhabitants. Using radiance time series from nighttime satellite data, we apply a break detection model, followed by a random forest classifier to distinguish switch-offs from other types of changes (renovation, reduced intensity). We first show that 64.4% of French municipalities adopted a switch-off policy between 2012 and 2023, including 53.3% after July 2022, and then identify the profiles of municipalities associated with the adoption of these policies.Finally, the fifth chapter evaluates the causal effect of public lighting switch-off policies on five types of crime between 2016 and 2023, using a staggered difference-in-differences approach. The results indicate that switching off public lighting has no impact on the types of crime under study, except for burglaries, where we observe a slight increase, mainly driven by high-density municipalities

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BobReflected Feb 6

@n8foo Nice images 🙂
I guess it is a target beloved by beginners - but it's deceptively hard to get it right 😉

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BobReflected Feb 2

@sundogplanets I'm with them!