Neilson Library, Smith College. Lighting, by Tillotson Design Associates, is carefully shielded against glare and light trespass, has color 2700K, and is not excessively bright. Indoor lights are controlled by timers to turn off after closing hours.
Smith College is an elite small liberal arts college historically for women in Northampton, MA (pop. 30,000). The student body is about 2800, with students from all over the US and many foreign countries. The surroundings are a mix of rural and urban, with the large city of Springfield, MA (pop 200,000) just 20 miles to the south, and mostly farmland, woodland, and small towns to the north and west.
The level of artificial sky glow is Bortle class 5 (1=best, 9=worst), with typical sky quality meter (SQM) readings of 20.0 mag/arcsec^2 under clear dark conditions; the Milky Way is barely detectable when directly overhead. . Efforts have been underway for decades to control light pollution on the Smith campus. Some highlights:
Prof. Emeritus of Astronomy Dick White worked with the college in the 70s and 80s to replace many light-polluting post-top walkway lighting fixtures with down-facing inverted goose-neck fixtures with little or no uplighting. Those are still the campus standard, now with 2700K LEDs and 17W (although sometimes 32W get installed).
For decades, Smith administration has responded to pressure from students and their families for more lighting “for safety” by holding every semester a lighting walk attended by students, faculty, staff, and campus safety officers. The original premise was more or less to find dark places on campus where students felt unsafe and install new lighting there. But over the years, regular participation by dark-sky advocates – including biologists, ecologists, landscape architects, and astronomers – has shifted the conversation, so that now the introduction to each lighting walk includes prominent mention of the need to use only responsible lighting, and along the walk we have many chances to point out glare or excessively bright or blue lighting and put it on the list to be corrected or removed.
Smith’s Campus Planning Committee officially endorsed in 2023 the IES/DarkSky International Five Principles of Responsible Outdoor Lighting. That followed a concerted effort by faculty and students culminating in a written request and formal presentation to the committee. Since endorsing the Five Principles, members of the administration have publicly cited them to help push back against calls for more lighting from Smith’s own faculty.
For the indoor and outdoor lighting for Smith’s $150M renovation of Neilson Library (designed by architect Maya Lin, completed in 2022), the project leaders chose one of the top dark-sky-friendly lighting designers in the world, Tillotson Design Associates of New York City. Tillotson installed only carefully selected, zero-glare, low-lumen, 2700K lighting that provides warm, soft, inviting illumination with minimal light trespass or uplighting. The negative effects on the nearby McConnell Observatory are very small. Numerous visitors have come from neighboring cities to look at and learn from the effective and beautiful outdoor lighting at Smith, especially outside Neilson Library.
Smith has strong environmental programming, with a Center for Environment, Ecological Design, and Sustainability; they help get the word out about dark-sky events, the twice annual lighting walks, etc.
Smith Astro has a TESS Stars4All photometer permanently mounted on the roof, delivering a 24/7 sky monitoring data stream. We also have hand-held SQM records going back to at least 2014.
Astronomy Prof. James Lowenthal has given numerous talks about light pollution over the past 20 years to faculty, students, and the larger community. He has also had many conversations with Facilities about dark skies and light pollution. They mostly respect and understand each other. Facilities now regularly consults with Lowenthal during selection of lighting for new construction.
But some electricians still often just want more lumens/watt and are not aware of the problems caused by 4000K “glare bombs”, which are actually allowed by Smith’s Campus Standards – and we aim to change that as soon as possible.
Prof. Lowenthal teaches a class on “Astronomy and Public Policy”, which includes light pollution as one of its main content areas (see Curriculum section).
Prof. Lowenthal co-led in 2019-2020 a year-long faculty-student weekly seminar on “Fear”, motivated by importance of fear of the dark in decision-making about lighting.
New lighting was installed ca. 2014 on Smith’s athletic fields. It is high-glare, high-blue metal halide, it shines directly into the McConnell Observatory telescope dome, and it causes sky glow over the observatory to brighten by as much as a factor of two. A coalition of concerned faculty members submitted in 2024 a detailed request (see Resources) for the lights to be brought into compliance with the criteria in DarkSky International’s Outdoor Sports Lighting program. The request is currently under consideration by Facilities, the Athletics Department, and the administration.
