| Issue #31, October 27, 2006 |
Save The Hamptons
Join the Bright Sky Society and Combat the Winter Doldrums
By Dan Rattiner
I want you to join our Bright Sky Society. You’ve heard of the Dark Sky Society. They were formed about ten years ago to see to it that us people on this planet do not shine bright lights all night long. And most people are going along with it. What could be bad? Lights in parking lots are dimmer. Street lights are dimmer and have shields on top. So now you look up and you see the dark skies and the twinkley stars out there, and you smile and say it’s working.
Well, get that smile off your face. I just went into Bernie’s Village Hardware Store on Newtown Lane in East Hampton and came out with all sorts of light bulbs. I got three-way bulbs, spotlights, floodlights, long-lasting lights and I even got new 40 watt lights for the chandelier in our dining room.
I had, at first, no idea why I was buying all these bulbs. All added together I had bought twenty of them. I just went in there and I did this. And then it occurred to me. It’s the last half of October. The dark is coming. It’s all about the dark.
It has happened very, very fast. It seems just yesterday that the sun was setting at 8:30 in the evening. You’d go out and have dinner at a fine restaurant and then go to the theatre and it would all be light and fun, and then you’d come out and it would be pitch black. And that would be okay.
The sun setting at 8:30 was something I very much was getting used to. We began to see numbers around 8:30 p.m. in late May and June and July, and even in August it was around that.
And suddenly, all that has changed. At the beginning of September it was 8:15. So that was okay. And then — the only way I can explain this — is that the earth hit a speed bump. Suddenly the time plummeted. By the end of September, just 30 days later, the sun was setting at 7 and here it is just twenty-five days later and the sunset is about 6:05. And it’s plummeting. It’s like the stock market crash of ’29.
“It really affects me,” Bernie said. “All the energy seems to go out of me. It’s dark. I’m about done spending winters here. I’m heading south in the winter.”
A woman shopper was listening to us and she said the winter months didn’t bother her at all.
“Where do you live?” I asked her.
“New York City,” she said.
“Well, yeah. In New York City they light all that up all night,” Bernie said. “Try the winter out here, why don’t you?”
“Yeah, buy some light bulbs,” I said. “Like me.”
She smiled and shook her head — you poor sap — and walked away.
And I might note the situation is not only going down quickly, it is going down faster. The bottom, when the sun sets somewhere around 4:15 in the afternoon, used to occur every year on December 19. It’s in all the record books. December 19 is the winter solstice. That’s the worst. It’s so bad that on that day, all around the world, in the northern hemisphere anyway, people in Sweden commit suicide and in the rest of the world, they celebrate by holding ceremonies on that day, a tradition which many of the fruit-and-berry type people here in America have latched onto as something which, on December 19, connects them up with native peoples around the world celebrating a tradition that has been going on for millions of years. Even animals celebrate on December 19. And people in Sweden commit suicide on December 19.
But it’s December 19 no more. Four years ago, using more sophisticated measuring devices, it was determined that the winter solstice is not December 19, but December 17. And this year, using even MORE sophisticated measuring devices, it is December 16. Look it up.
One of the employees who works at the Hardware Store had been listening to our conversation and went in the back and came back with a chart.
“See for yourself,” he said, unfolding it. “This is a print out from THIS latitude. Here it is. December 16. They’ve been wrong all these years.”
Or things have been changing in recent years. Maybe it’s global warming. Or the speed bump. I looked at sunRISE. Sunrise in summer is about 6 am. On December 16, it will be at 7:30 a.m. Awful. In December we get 9 hours of light and 15 hours of dark. I am not in favor of this.
Bernie showed me lots of new sorts of light bulbs you can buy that use, for example, 28 watts of energy that give out 100 watts of light.
“I have these in my basement rec room,” he said. “Suddenly it’s bright. And it’s about a quarter of the electricity. Try them. And they last 7000 hours. Amazing.”
And so I have walked out with three shopping bags filled with light bulbs.
I think there are good prospects for a Bright Sky Society. We have hit a really, really bad speed bump this autumn that has speeded us up toward the solstice in a matter of days, not weeks. And honestly, I don’t think the Dark Sky people are helping matters.
And consider this. All around the world, we have these telescopes and radio towers that are broadcasting sounds and lights out into the universe looking for some response that will tell us that we are not alone in the cosmos and somewhere out there is intelligent life.
We have to light the place up if we want to be seen. We’ve got to fill the skies, and the ground, and the buildings, with lights of all sorts, flashlights, searchlights, candle lights, torches, lanterns, flaming batons, whatever.
Over here. Over here.
And I think from now until next May, we should put our very biggest lights, our search lights and our floodlights, lots of them, right on the land behind which the sun sets, because that’s where the problem is. We have to stop this once and for all.
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