The view from your app

App user Susana Malón Giménez showed the following images at the 13th European Symposium for the Protection of the Night Sky, and she gave me permission to post them here.

The first image shows badly glaring parking lot lighting:

Parking by Susana Malón Giménez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

 
This type of lighting actually reduces your ability to see what's going on, which is not at all desirable in a parking lot!  The second image is titled no common sense:

No common sense by Susana Malón Giménez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The difficulty of the Spanish economy is awful for everyone in Spain. The only good news that I took from the visit is that Spanish cities are now very seriously confronting bad lighting. There were many talks which presented areas that were formerly over lit, where recent improvements in the lighting system have resulted in a massive energy savings. In many cases, the visibility in such areas has been greatly improved by removing glaring lights. You can see how this works in the following image:

Globo luminaria by Susana Malón Giménez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

At first glance, did you see the two people under the lamps? Click to look at the full size image if you still can't see them. Globe lamps are often particularly bad for visibility, because they are not only glaring, but sometimes provide almost no light directly under them. Globe lamps are also particularly bad for the environment, because they shine more than half of their light upwards. It goes into trees where birds and bats live, and it goes into the sky, masking the Milky Way, and causing the sky to glow.

Later this week, I hope to present images of some of the the very good modernized lighting that we saw in Spain.