CIE 2016 - Day 1

The first day of #CIE2016 is over, I’m not sure they realise they need a hashtag, and it was packed full of exciting detail.  It was fantastic to hear a talk from a local indigenous man, he described the plight of Australian aboriginals and how this local land was once a burial ground.  I wish he had spoken of how the light form Melbourne is ruining the night sky and the elaborate stories that the Australian aboriginies used to transfer knowledge through the ages of 50,000 years of occupation of this continent.  I’ll be missing the next meeting of Sydney City Skywatchers on next Monday night 7th March where Duane Haramacher, formerly of Macquarie University Sydney but now of Monash University Melbourne will be talking in indigenous astronomy. 

The Keynote Presenation by Bruce Ramus was impressive as he always is, Bruce’s resume including working on spectacular rock music shows of likes of U2 gave wonderful experience with large video screens.  The latest achievements of Ramus Entertaiment includes building size presenations such as the full facade display of Commonwealth Bank at Darling Harbour Sydney, and an impressive full building size barometer for 800 Collins Street Melbourne and an impressive building in Perth.  It can be difficult aligning these efforts with the objectie of acheiving dark skies, and as Bruce’s talk emphasised that city planners are moving to 24 hour cities, smart cities and public spaces where information is delivered through interactive lighitng displays.  Soon 70% of the population of world will be living in city - will they ever see a starry night sky?

The #CIE2016 runs in three strands and it’s impossible to see and hear everything, my choice was for the technical nature of ‘Advanced Radiometry and Photometry’ and I dragged Dr Nick Lomb (formerly of Sydney Observatory) and now with IDA Victoria, along to this session.  Of the four speakers two where concerned with measuring and estimating the the uncertainities in measuring colour, my discrete mathematics was taken for a test run as they spoke on Monte Carlo simulations from their collected databases, so I’m glad I took those gradute statistics classes in 2015.  The other talks were on actually measuring colour and the laser calibrated trap detector is evidence that lasers are making their way into lighting. 

I might need to leave day 1 report here for the moment because it's the begining of day 2 and I need to get the conference, so I'll update with a few images later.  Looks like excellent weather in Melbourne, first time ever I've been here and it's not raining.

And a fitting way to end the first day was with an SQM reading from Fiztroy Gardens, 18.36 from the centre of Melbourne, unfortunately I needed an astro finder on the iPhone to locate Crux, only three stars barely visible, delta Crucis was definitely not visible - but it was clear night.  I made my first Melbourne entry for Globe At Night http://www.globeatnight.org 

The Hon. Lily D'Ambrosio Vic Minister for Industry
Minister for Energy and Resources

SOLIS and IDA Victoria have attended the first day of Australian Smart Lighting Conference 2015 or try #auslight2015.  This is conference for the lighting industry so no specific topics dealing with light pollution.  The conference does give an excellent overview of where various organisations are at with new technologies and ideas in the Australian sphere.

The current trend in the bread & butter component of the lighting industry, street lighting, is the refits of LED streetlights.  This is also a trend across the world in the USA and Europe in particular, I also discovered today that China is also racing ahead.  Some of these programs in other countries, and an example is the city of Davis, California where an LED program was halted and assessed on the premise of community amenity because the CCT of the newly installed lights was considered by the residents to be too high.  The high CCT of these lights was felt to be too harsh and too much glare.  The high CCT results in a very sharp white colour more suitable for clinical hospitals than residential streets.

So where is the Australian LED program at?  The Hon. Lily D'Ambrosia is Victorian Minister for Industry and also the Minister for Energy and Resources, she spoke at length regarding the national positioning of Victoria as the leading State for road lighting efficiency.  All State Govts. and the Federal Govt have schemes that encourage the replacement of old technology road lighting with energy efficient road lighting and of course this means LEDs, the greater the efficiency gains the greater the incentive.  This means that the blue-rich LEDs will almost always win out.

I'll leave the actual numbers for another blog, I think SOLIS and IDA Victoria need to be suggesting that  any efficiency gains should be accepted and that lower CCT lights will also bring savings and additional benefits without the risk of blue-rich light

Here's an interesting article on light and health the Sydney Morning Herald last Sunday 21st June 2015. Six Ways Sleep Deprivation Can Damage Your Life . The article is at an introductory level and doesn't include any mention of melatonin - still it is worth a read.  The graph showing the increase of incidents related to sleep disorders is interesting - it's  steady increase.  And the link to Altzheimers is also important for investigation.

Blue Light Symposium - New York, New York

Have some spare time, can afford a last minute trip to New York, New York.  Starts on June 26 - 2015.  Could be fun, certain to be interesting - here's the link New York Blue Light Symposium

Back to it

Submitted the final assignment for this semester of my Masters in Illumination Design.  It's been a hectic time since returning from Canada and LPTMM2015 and ALAN2015.  Hoping I can get a SOLIS meeting up over the coming week, meetings have been delayed and reorganised this year because of my university commitments.

And back to LPTMM2015, the website has been updated and can be found here : LPTMM2015 just like you attended the conference - and without the jet lag.  All of the presentations are fantastic material if you're interested in the effects of light in our environment.  Not only for humans, also for wildlife, it's important to acknowledge that animals may see in a different part of the spectrum to humans and that lighting must also be tuned to the needs of wildlife, two of the talks were on the topic of wildlife, Robert Dick of Canada spoke on a luminaire designed to have a low impact on wildlife and Kellie Pendolly and Rob Ryan (the other Australians at LPTMM2015), Kellie is a an environmental scientist specialising in turtles and marine science, find her here Pendolly Environmental .

High
CCT not always blue

Robert Dick was in Australia recently attending World Parks Conference in 2014, hoping that he could convince environmentalists of low CCT lights with a low emission component of blue light.  So I'm stealing a couple of images from his presentation.  Roberts presentation centred on the human response to light, and how a high CCT is not always correlated to spectrum, it depends on manufacturer and that some LEDs have a low CCT but a strong emission in the blue spectrum.

SPDs of Commercial LEDs

And the result could be something like this.

So what is ALAN and why 2015.

ALAN is the acronym for 'Artificial Light at Night' (don't start on the topic of - 'artificial').  Basically as humans have created a lit environment - for use in daylight and at night, the natural environmental conditions that humans evolved under has been replaced by an artificial environment. Is that good or bad or does it matter?

I came to the issue of light pollution through astronomy, as a child I was able to stand in the backyard of a suburban home in Sydney and see the Centaurus arm of our galaxy and in particular a dark nebula in the constellation Crux - the Southern Cross, the constellation that Australia and many Australians have used to identify ourselves as a nation, a constellation that is now fading as the increased level of light pollution floods the night sky.

One aspect of ALAN investigated at the conference was the social concepts and policy and use of lighting, in both interior and exterior uses.  A curious aside to one of the talks was a topic of 'Film Noir after black-and-white' by Dr Will Straw of McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University,Qc, Canada.  Dr Straw's talk by concentrating on the lighting conditions used in film noir contrasted the ideas of dark as threatening with the idea of light as safety and surety, light being an answer, solution or possibly saviour revealing the truth - light can only be good.

Well away from the days of film noir we use light to obviously extend our days and presumably our productivity - again increased productivity must be good and so light must also be good.  We even extend our natural day by using a technique of daylight savings so we adjust our clocks to use more of the natural day.  However by increasing our use of the day, this increases the load and energy demands on the human body, the human body responds to sleep by repairing damage to the body.

So is artificial light at night preventing the body from repairing damage?  If that damage isn't repaired then what is the immediate, short term and long term consequences of human health?

Our relationship to light is complex and without doubt the answer may well be complex, although the easiest solution is to turn off the lights.

Tweeting Light

The conferences were packed with amazing talks and stacks of information,  I'll be keen to see the presentations up on-line as well as the recorded versions up on You-Tube.  I tried keeping the Tweet stream for @SOLIS_Syd going, getting the message on light pollution out there and getting it recognised is difficult,  Twitter is fantastic social media platform for connecting with people and it was a buzz to meet up with people running Twitter accounts on light pollution who until now were simply Twitter accounts.  So here's a list of some of us @josianemeier @remiboucher @pmisson @sjribas @riverperkin @IDAToronto @IDADarkSky @cities4night @IDAQuebec @skyglowberlin @travislongcore @RASC_LPA I'm sure there's many more.