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Lisa Bruhn of the
IDA.
On
April 15th I received an email from Lisa Bruhn, San Diego Section
Leader for the IDA, about a public meeting to be held at the Holiday
Inn at Carlsbad on April 25th.
Plans had been
in place for a while to have the meeting - however it was members
of the San Diego Astronomical Association
and Oceanside Photo and Telescope
who prompted Lisa to contact us about our interest.
Thanks SDAA
and OPT!
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This whole area
is a very important one for us to be very involved in.
After some emails
between the board we decided to formally sponsor the meeting to
the tune of $250. The board believes that we must get involved in
this way - to show our profound support for the IDA and these issues.
The funds would be found very useful by the IDA in covering their
costs for the meeting and also setting up the new southern California
section of the IDA.
I drove down
to the meeting with Russell Sipe and Bill Hepner. We arrived in
good time to be able to setup some displays on our club.
I was especially
concerned that visitors to the meeting would understand why the
OCA was involved in a San Diego Light Pollution meeting.
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Our display at the
meeting.
We had one panel explaining why we were there, another about
our Anza site, and a print of Russ Sipes Southern California Light
Pollution Map.
You will also see that
we had some color brochures on our club (we are working on creating
a new brochure on our club to hand out at various outreach events
and meetings such as this one)
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Why are we
here?
No I was not asking for the answer to one of life's mysteries...
but I did want attendees to understand some of the important reasons
why they were being visited by folks from "up north"
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Dr
David Crawford
David is Executive Director of the IDA and he gave an excellent presentation
on the Dark-Sky issues and just how easy it is to overcome light pollution
on a win-win basis. |
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Blinded
by light!
The presentation had several practical demonstrations of good and
bad lighting fixtures. Guess which one this represents. |
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Russell
Sipe.
Russ was
added into the meeting program when Lisa learned of his excellent
work that he had done to produce a detailed map of Light Pollution
for southern California. Members who were at the April meeting will
know exactly what this is about as Russ presented the information
as part of his presentation then. |
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SDAA
Vice President John Restivo presented several examples where their
efforts have resulted in good lighting decisions which otherwise would
have been very bad for their clubs observing site near Tierra del
sol. |
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The
Audience .
Quite a number of people attended and enjoyed both the talk and the
good food that was laid on. Here you can see quite a number of the
SDAA members on the left. We also had 6 members attend including Dick
Greenwald, Barbara Toy, Pamela Brandt, Bill Hepner, Russell Sipe and
myself. |
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Raffle
drawing.
Various excellent prizes were raffled off to help raise money to cover
IDA costs. The grand prize was a Meade ETX 70AT telescope. I won nothing
- however Bill Hepner walked away with a nice new pair of binoculars.
The prizes were donated by Meade, Oceanside Photo and Telescope, SDAA
and the Glare-Buster lighting company. |
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IDA
presentation board.
The IDA had much information on display about lighting issues - including
an article that appeared in a San Diego area paper and the recent
interview with DR Crawford that appeared on CNN.com. |
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IDA work
in San Diego
Lisa Bruhn will
be working in the short term on some relevant and timely issues
related to light pollution in San Diego. This includes a meeting
with the Mayor of San Diego specifically regarding the execution
of the cities choice to change from Sodium light fixtures to higher
power "white-light" versions. There is some expectation
that with the IDA's help it may be possible to limit the impact
of the new lights by careful implementation of proper fixtures.
At some time
over the next few months we are hoping that Lisa Bruhn will visit
with us in Orange County to see how she can leverage her expertise
in all the appropriate areas impacting our club (including issues
related to Anza and also local issues for Orange County). We shall
see if we can arrange for Lisa to give our members a presentation
at an upcoming monthly meeting.
A call to
action - how you can help!
I spent some
time talking with Lisa about what our next steps should be. Specifically
I wanted to know how we could best help our cause by helping her
in any way we could. Lisa suggested that we should at the very least
start photographing examples of good and bad lighting around Orange
County.
For example
(images taken from the IDA
web site)
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