Light Pollution Problem

I was reading in ‘The Sun’ news paper (which we receive a couple of times a year – but that’s a delivery problem) that a Cairns company has developed a wrap-around skin for low power ‘light poles’ with imbedded photo voltaic's as an earth friendly way to generate ‘clean’ power and good for them, well done!

Our electricity distribution people have suggested that they will wait a year to see how it goes (very admirable) considering that in our end of Cambridge Street, Gulliver alone there are no less than thirty (30) street lights in around 1km and by their own admission there are millions of the things throughout the country, a fact that any ‘lover’ of the heavens knows only too well.

These lights are all unshielded lights with only a small amount of their radiated light doing the job they were supposedly designed to do, the rest is scattered in every direction including up.  Now we get to my point as a ‘stargazer’ or amateur astronomer hopeful!

Folks, we have lost our beautiful skies.  There is no longer a lovely ‘Milky Way’ above our cities and large towns.  If we have lights to light up our streets

MARS – Here We Come???

Our near neighbour Mars (The Rusty Planet) a rich ochre colour very similar to our countries (Australia) west coast and interior in colour and never very large in the eyepiece when viewed from Earth.  Best at times like now with opposition just past.  Its size varies over the years from around 4 arc/sec to 25 arc/sec at its closest approach to our home world for this year 2010.  In January it achieved something like 14.5 arc/sec angular diameter and -2.8 mag.

The little planet begins its celestial show low in the eastern sky and does its ‘jitter bug’ journey across the heavens over a few months only to