Lighting in Sherbrooke, Quebéc

The Third International Conference on Artificial Light at Night just wrapped up today in Sherbrooke, Quebéc. Walking through the city this evening, I took a few photos of some street lights that caught my eye. Sherbrooke has made a major commitment to minimizing the city's effect on the nighttime environment, and one of the ways they do this is by replacing older lamps with newer fixtures that don't send light up into the environment. You can see this really well in the photo below, where the fixtures aren't visible from above, but by the reflection in the water you can see how bright they are:

Full cutoff lights reflecting from a river by Christopher Kyba is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Of course, near a waterway the ideal light shines only on the path and not into the water... But I think it's a great photo for demonstrating how full cutoff lights work. In most cities, there would be two bright spots - one from the lamp and the second from the reflection.

The same lamps were on the bridge I was crossing over the river when I took the photo, and I was impressed that in addition to not producing any upward directed light, they also have very little glare. Compare the two photos below - which street would you rather drive on?

Low glare streetlamps by Christopher Kyba is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Glaring streetlamps by Christopher Kyba is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In a few weeks, the Artificial Light at Night conference will start to fill up with pdfs and videos of the presentations. There will even be a video of me, talking about the Loss of the Night app!