Light pollution

Riverside county is experiencing rapid growth that threatens to pollute the night sky with a glow of man-made light. Most light pollution is an unnecessary by-product of poorly designed light fixtures that also waste energy, create visibility hazards, and can be considered intrusive. Failure to design for the effect of Riverside County's growth on the night time environment will affect communities, observatories, parks, and wilderness areas. While many of the effects are merely unpleasant or nuisances, some have safety ramifications and threaten scientific research at Palomar Observatory.

An appeal for dark skies (mission statement)

 

Lighting Information

Basic Concepts/ Problems and Solutions
Good and Bad Examples from the Temecula Valley
Where to get good lights
Lighting news, links, and resources

Handouts and illustrations (right-click and choose download):
Lighting for Homeowners (70kB, pdf)
Principles affecting lighting design (340kb,pdf)
Replacing a perfectly good BAD light(120kb,pdf)
Billboard lighting (23kb,pdf)
Benefits from Palomar Observatory

Astronomy

(Includes the demos shown below and other topics)

Climate and Earth Science

 

Aesthetic and Scientific Interests

Temecula Valley Astronomers (map and meeting information)

My blog: brightStarsWildomar.blogspot.com

Animated demos in Flash:

Geo timeline

Geological timeline

Includes 147 time-indexed entries between the current year and 4.7 billion years ago. Each entry summarizes one or more research papers

Moon orbit

Moon orbit

Watch the moon change phase and size over its orbit, as photographed in June 2008

Earth, orbit, and climate

Orbital Viewer

Interactive illustration about long-term changes to Earth's orbit

Climage Change Picture Book

Earth, Orbit, and Climate

Illustrations from a presentation


link to astro presentation

Slides and animations from Night Under The Stars, Aug. 15, Wildomar

Right is a view of our planet from space (Adobe Flash viewer is needed.)

NEW: Click the diagram below to see an interactive demo of summarizing a research paper from Nature (23 April 2009) on the fertilization effect of aerosols fertilization effect of aerosols).

Fertilization effect of aerosols