I’ve been involved with light pollution since the early days of the formation of the "International Dark Sky Association" (now "DarkSky International"). I head the North Carolina chapter of DarkSky and help with projects across the state.
I have had some successes and some failures with my own town and campus lighting. These have been pre-Campus SHINE since that is brand new.
With the town I was invited in to the development of Appearance Standards, which included lighting. I helped them develop their lighting ordnance, which became effective January 1, 2006, and has been successful in controlling new, and renovated, commercial property lighting.
With the AppState campus I was invited in to approve proposed replacement of the Sternberg Prairie model post-top sidewalk lighting. The original fixtures were awful, with vertical discharge tubes that gave both discomfort and disability glare (picture below).
These were retrofitted by a third party with LEDs, up in the cap, to provide full cutoff lighting. A view of a campus greenspace illuminated by the improved lighting is shown below:
However, at the time we did not realize that the blue spike in the spectrum of typical LEDs, is right at the center of the spectral response for human nighttime vision, as seen in this spectrum I took:
So, we will need to address this as the fixtures need replacing.
My current efforts are to form a campus SHINE group (AsuSHINE?), composed of the members suggested in the SHINE manual. I already have interested parties in biology, interior design, students, student government, campus energy management, campus sustainability, and other areas. We will work to form the group this semester and hopefully make progress this summer, when schedules are a bit freer.
