Town Turns Off the Lights To See the Stars

The main reasons for street lighting is to make obstacles and pedestrians more visible to motorists, to allow pedestrians to move around without carrying a torch, and to make them feel safer.

In this case, they'd closed the roads around the town for this stunt, so no need for worrying about cars, and a good fraction of the population of the town was out on the street, so there were fewer empty dark back alleys down which to get stabbed (plus it's a small rural town; if it's anything like mine crime is generally livestock related...), and everyone there knew about it months in advance, so I'd expect they were stocked up on torches and batteries. It was just a shame it was so cloudy!

If you have never seen the stars without light pollution, go to somewhere in the middle of nowhere and have a look. It's quite hard to do in the UK, as our population density (and thus light pollution) is many times that of the US, so there aren't many really empty places left. It's a real tragedy that for a little convenience and marginal extra safety we've given up our window seat at the edge of the rest of the universe.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/GMbE0HW0Wsk/town-turns-off-the-lights-to-see-the-stars

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