Dark-Sky Protection at Province Lake
- by Bernie Reim -

Published Online to Public: April 2, 2021
Bernie Reim is an astronomy professor at the University of Southern Maine, who lives on Lost Mile Road. He frequently takes walks along the roads that border Province Lake. When it's frozen, he enjoys walking out on the lake just after sunset, wearing a bright orange hat. I met him during his road walks, and perhaps you have seen him or met him in the same way. Bernie publishes a monthly astronomy column in the Portland Press Herald called "What’s Up in [month]". HERE is the March 2021 edition. Bernie also has a weekly half-hour radio show called "Scientifically Speaking" at 1:00 PM on Fridays on WMPG, 90.9 FM. Bernie and I share an interest in protecting the high quality darkness around Province Lake, so we agreed to collaborate on this page written primarily by him. Enjoy!

Video from the Night Sky Heritage page of the web site for the International Dark-Sky Association

I hope to inspire you to get involved in a citizen science project to monitor the night sky where you live and contribute some real data that will help reduce light pollution near Province Lake and beyond. I hope to make more people aware of the problem and better understand what they can do about it.

We are all citizen scientists to some degree, regardless of our profession or our stage of life. All it takes is natural curiosity, and concern and motivation to make a difference. We just need to volunteer a little bit of time and take some action to gain far greater rewards by learning more about our world than we could have in any other way. Academic education is part of it, but there is much more that we can learn and do beyond that.

Light pollution is a far bigger problem than you may think. The solutions are also easier to implement than you may think, once enough people become aware of the problem and take the right actions. We all have much more power than we know to positively influence our surroundings and make changes that benefit not only people, but the plants and animals that share this planet with us.

Implementing more effective solutions to this problem is relevant to everyone on earth. It has wide-reaching implications ranging from energy use, safety, cost, and many aspects of our health and welfare, to the health and safety of many other species, including migrating birds and endangered sea turtles. Beyond that, the deep and lasting beauty of a truly dark and pristine sky is our natural heritage that well over half the people currently living on Earth have never even experienced. Fortunately, Province Lake and its vicinity still have very high quality dark skies, with minimal sky glow. On a clear moonless night, the Milky Way is obvious and glorious. This is a resource worthy of our protection. Redesign of a few glaring examples of poor lighting around the lake would make a huge difference; these cases are easily fixed if the owners decide to fix them.

There are many citizen science projects that anyone can participate in based on whatever you are passionate about, some on this web site. For this page, we will focus on the night sky. Click on the icon at right to go to the "Globe at Night" project on the SciStarter website for details. With Globe at Night, citizen scientists match the appearance of a constellation they see with 7 star maps of progressively fainter stars. They then submit their choice of star map online with their date, time, and location to help create a light pollution map worldwide. You don't even have to count the stars!

Please go to the International Dark-Sky Association website for more details of what you can do to fix your own lighting, to make others aware of this problem, and to learn how you can advocate for more effective lighting in your own town. This web site has a tremendous amount of information and is worth a look, even just to see the amazing photos.

You will find that there are five simple rules that everyone can follow when it comes to good lighting. 1) Light only what you need. 2) Shield lights and direct them downward. 3) Use energy efficient bulbs and only as bright as you need. 4) Only use light when you need it. 5) Choose warm white light bulbs and not the bluer ones.


Far too much energy is wasted in our outdoor lighting, especially in the larger towns and cities. While they may look nice when flying over them in an airplane, like a giant spreading living organism, almost all of the light that you can see from above is really wasted because it should not be projected into space in the first place. About 35% of our light is wasted and creates that artificial sky glow that obstructs our view of the real sky and all the subtle beauty that it contains. That costs us about 3 billion dollars per year that could be used for far better purposes than causing useless pollution of a precious natural resource. About 600 million trees would have to be planted to offset the amount of carbon emission that the wasted 35% of our light creates. We can do much better than that once we know about it and demand change and more efficiency.

Once you gather and submit data for Globe at Night from near Province Lake, your hometown (if not at the lake), or places you may visit, it will be integrated into a worldwide database that you may access anytime to see how well any part of our world is doing. It will be used to monitor lighting ordinance compliance, as well as to study the effects of light pollution on animal and plant ecology and human health and safety. This is an opportunity to make meaningful contributions and to replace bad habits and ignorance with good habits and knowledge.

April 5 to 12, 2021, is International Dark Sky Week. This designation will draw more attention to this problem and what people around the world can do about it. Many events are planned that you can check out on their website.

The incomprehensible wonder and truly awe-inspiring nature of a dark sky has inspired much of our great art, literature, and music here on earth. Far too few of us have ever really experienced a primordial night sky that is so crystal clear and dark that the Milky Way becomes bright enough to cast your own shadow onto the ground. That is the combined light of 100 billion stars about 30,000 light-years away from Earth. The light you see at night that is the source of this wonderful sight, the very backbone of the night, forever unifying the earth with the sky, has been traveling towards us at nearly 6 trillion miles per year for all of that time. It left its source about the time that the very last Neanderthals, our nearest relatives as a species of archaic humans, died and became forever extinct. Let us make sure that our view of the pristine beauty of the night sky does not suffer the same fate.



If you would like to ask Bernie about astronomy or dark skies or anything else, please send an email to province-lake-water@cox.net and I will put you in contact. If you realize that your outdoor lighting might be problematic and would like some help figuring out what to do about it, please send an email to the same address and Bernie and I would be happy to help you out. There is plenty to learn, and helping you will help us learn.


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