light pollution

NEW YORK — When the court lights flicker on at the U.S. Open, tennis stars shine under illumination designed to cut light pollution.

The wedge-shaped lamps around the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows direct light onto the players without spewing it into the surrounding skies.

The stadium complex is the only professional sports venue certified by a group that’s trying to preserve the night sky around the world. Across North America and Canada, schools and local parks have also swapped out their lights on baseball fields, running tracks and other recreation grounds to preserve their view of the stars and protect local wildlife.

Night lights can disrupt bird migration and confuse nocturnal critters like frogs and fireflies. Lights on sports fields are especially bright and cool, and often cast their glare into neighborhoods.

In renovations over the last decade, the U.S. Tennis Assn. swapped metal halide bulbs for shielded LED lights. The complex’s 17 tournament courts — including Arthur Ashe Stadium — and five practice courts were approved as dark sky-friendly last year.

USTA officials wanted the best lighting possible on their courts, which also happened to be friendly to dark skies. Their lighting company suggested striking a balance that would satisfy crowds and TV crews while cutting down spillover into the surrounding environment.

“This is an international event that has an impact on the community,” said the USTA’s managing director of capital projects and engineering, Chuck Jettmar. “Let’s minimize that and make sure that everybody’s happy with it.”

Designing lights for dark skies

U.S. Open qualifying matches last week were punctuated by players grunting, crickets chirping and audiences cheering. Rows of lights stood like sentries above, adorned with flat visors that guided the glow onto the action.

The lights at Flushing Meadows glow at a quarter of their brightness when the courts are rented for play during the year. They’re approved by DarkSky International, a nonprofit that gives similar designations to cities and national parks. The group widened its focus to include sports arenas in recent years and has certified more than 30 venues since 2019 — including high school football fields and youth soccer fields.

“We live in a world where we need to engage with one another in the nighttime environment, and that’s OK,” said DarkSky spokesperson Drew Reagan. “That’s a beautiful thing and there’s a way to do that responsibly.”

The organization typically approves proposals at sports fields before any light fixtures are installed or replaced. Once construction is complete, a representative measures the glow and glare against a set of guidelines that benefit the night.

Renovating a field with dark skies in mind can cost about 5% to 10% more than traditional sports lighting, according to James Brigagliano, who runs DarkSky’s outdoor sports lighting program. Venues may require a few extra fixtures since the light shining from them is more targeted.

Most arenas make the change during scheduled maintenance and renovation, working with sports lighting company Musco. The company lights more than 3,000 venues a year, including college football stadiums, tennis courts and rail yards.

At Superstition Shadows Park in Apache Junction, Ariz., kids play T-ball and baseball in the evenings, when the darkness offers a brief respite from the summer heat. The city’s parks and recreation department replaced its already-aging lights with shielded, dark sky-friendly fixtures last year with federal and local government funding.

People venture to Apache Junction partly because “they can get out of the city and still see stars,” said the city’s parks and recreation director, Liz Langenbach. The city is at the edge of the Phoenix metro area, bordered by rolling mountains and sweeping deserts.

“The choices we make on lighting, I think, affect all of that,” Langenbach said.

At Université Sainte-Anne in Canada, students run on a new track and soccer field outfitted with lights that DarkSky approved last year. Researchers at the university study native, nocturnal animals like the northern saw-whet owl.

The lights are “good for everyone,” said university spokesperson Rachelle LeBlanc. “For tourism, for our students, for our neighbors, for the animals that we share our campus with.”

How to cut light pollution

Night lights harm the surrounding environment no matter how shielded they are. DarkSky-approved fields still allow a small fraction of their light to be pointed up because it’s necessary to keep track of flying balls.

“You can have the absolute best, most carefully designed stadium lighting in the world, and you’re still creating light pollution,” said Travis Longcore, an urban light pollution expert at UCLA.

The U.S. Open courts are side-by-side with bright lights from Manhattan and Queens — so they can only darken a slice of the sky. But DarkSky says every light fixture makes a difference, and one professional arena can influence others.

“I’m not saying we as humans have to turn all the lights off,” said Longcore. “I think you have to make improvements from where you are.”

Ramakrishnan writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Shooting stars will usher in Earth Day starting late Monday night as the Lyrid meteor shower reaches its peak — and Californians will have some of the best views in the country.

The annual meteor shower event will be most visible in April and is named after the constellation Lyra, the harp, located near the point in the sky where the Lyrids appear to originate. The shower is one of the oldest on record, with observations dating back more than 2,700 years.

The peak of the event will be Monday night into the early morning hours of Tuesday, Earth Day. Thanks to clear skies, almost all of California is forecast to have good viewing conditions, along with some regions of other western states, parts of the Southwest and a pocket of the Midwest, including areas west and south of Chicago, according to AccuWeather.

In Los Angeles and other major cities where light pollution is pervasive, stargazers will have some difficulty seeing the shower despite the ideal weather conditions due to the light pollution from homes, businesses, streetlights and cars.

“These events are notoriously invisible for the average person because we’re all drowning in artificial light, and so there’s really not a prayer for most people to get to see this at all,” said Ed Krupp, the director of Griffith Observatory.

To get a clearer view of the stars, Krupp suggests those in Southern California should head out to the mountains or desert. Once hopeful viewers are “far from urban encroachment,” their chance of catching more shooting stars is much better, he said.

Krupp, who’s been serving as the iconic L.A. observatory’s director since 1974, said it’s important for people to temper their expectations of what they could see from the meteor shower.

“The very name sort of suggests that there are meteors pouring down on you,” he said. “You’re not likely to see more than one meteor a minute, and the Lyrids are not that populous, so the average time between one and then the next might be three minutes or so. It’s a process that demands patience and attention.”

The name “meteor shower” might also incorrectly imply that what viewers are seeing are meteors themselves, or the leftover comet particles and bits from broken asteroids, instead of the trail left behind them. “You’re seeing a glowing tunnel of hot air that might be 10 miles in diameter produced by this very tiny little pebble that’s passing through the atmosphere and burns up,” Krupp said.

Still, Krupp said seeing just one shooting star is a special experience, and one that will often elicit cheers if you’re in the company of other stargazers. He described the celestial lights as “charmers,” saying there is an “emotional, uplifting” feeling you get when you witness one pass through the sky.

Krupp’s best tips for an optimal viewing experience include dressing warm and making yourself as comfortable as possible, given that dedicated viewers could be staring up at the sky for at least a few hours, going well past midnight. Shooting stars can be easy to miss, he added, so staying focused and being patient are key. He warns against cell phone use, both because of the light it emits and the distraction it causes.

With the peak of the shower coming during the first few hours of Earth Day, Krupp chuckled at the alignment of the galaxy’s display and our observance of the holiday.

“The cosmos is a cold, random and uncaring place, but somehow it manages to converge with our own emotional bonds,” he said.