- This beautiful long exposure of the Milky Way was photographed along the darker Santa Cruz north coast. Credit: Jay Huang, CC BY 2.0
January 7, 2025—At a recent meeting of the Santa Cruz chapter of DarkSky International, the conversation touched on the impact of light pollution on stargazing, but covered many other topics.
Responding to a reporter’s questions, several participants shared their favorite places to view the night sky in and around Santa Cruz. But there was also discussion of the impact of artificial light on salmon in the San Lorenzo River. There was talk of street lights near bluffs on the West Side that negatively affect life beneath the waves. One member told of the ways artificial light hurts birds. And there was a conversation about the city of Santa Cruz’s efforts to implement lighting policies suggested by the DarkSky people themselves.
The International Dark-Sky Association, now DarkSky International, was founded by two astronomers—one an amateur who bought a piece of property outside Phoenix, Arizona, and built his own telescope, and the other the director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory—one of the largest arrays of optical and radio telescopes in the world…