Practical solutions for local communities not only save money, but they also recognize that many lights are simply unnecessary (above: photos taken before and during a power outage in 2003 in the town of Goodwood, Ontario, reveal a dramatic difference in the night sky). Just as a bright light coming into a bedroom window might interrupt the sleep of any one of us, darkness is a foundational need of untold floral and animal species artificial light impedes their ability to rest, feed and reproduce. And as light pollution literally makes the darkness disappear, all types of plants and animals, accustomed to cycles of night and day for millions of years, are being dramatically affected in ways both obvious and unknown. The stunning array is now rendered invisible for some 60 percent of Europeans and almost 80 percent of North Americans. One-third of the world’s population can’t see the starry band of light in the night sky that makes up the Milky Way-the vast spiraled arms of our own galaxy.
Glow from buildings, parking lots, roadways, billboards, landscape lighting and countless other sources blots out the stars over a surprisingly large part of the planet and disrupts the lifecycles of birds, insects and other creatures.
TURN OFF THE LIGHTS. DRIVERS
“Everybody all around the world has some kind of story about the night sky.”Ĭelestial beauty is something sacred that is shared across human cultures around the globe, he says.Ī study published in 2021 found that light pollution has increased by at least half over just the past 25 years (above: glare from bright, unshielded streetlights can make it difficult for drivers to notice pedestrians).īut today the connections that have always tethered humanity to the same night sky are disappearing behind the ubiquitous brightness of artificial lights. “The night sky belongs to everybody-this is humanity’s common heritage,” says Stephen Loring, an archaeologist with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. To America’s Ojibwe people, the celestial figure is Biboonkeonini the Wintermaker, who, they know by tracking movements of the stars, becomes most prominent during the coldest season of the year. In India, the constellation was seen as a king who’d been shot by an arrow. The Arabs interpreted the starry figure as a giant. The Egyptians regarded the same group of stars as the place where the soul of a god-Osiris-found eternal rest. They dubbed him Orion, and the hunter’s story has persisted for thousands of years. Turn Off the Lights has a 4.76-star rating at the Chrome extension website with over 7458 reviews, and has been featured on Google Blog, Lifehacker, MacLife, CNET, and New York Times.Gazing upward into the night sky, the Greeks recognized a human figure in the stars. A keyboard shortcut gives users quick access to the program's services. The extension can also be set to dim the screen automatically, and there are a variety of YouTube-specific features as well to bring an object to the front. Users can adjust the opacity of the screen blocking and select a color other than black if desired. Clicking outside the video restores the rest of the screen. A gray lamp icon is displayed in the browser menu bar when a video is detected users click on the icon to make the screen surrounding the video fade. Turn Off the Lights is a browser extension that lets users dim everything on their screen except the Flash or HTML5 video they're watching, minimizing distractions and making for a more pleasant viewing experience for the internet users. There is also a Turn Off the Lights bookmarklet for other browsers. It is available as a plugin for Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Maxthon and Yandex Browser.
TURN OFF THE LIGHTS. FREE
Turn Off the Lights is a free browser extension developed by Stefan vd.
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