October 7, 2022
Chris talks to Stephen C. Hummell of McDonald Observatory about the newly designated Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve – the largest (and ONLY international) Dark Sky Reserve on the planet! So, what’s a Dark Sky Reserve? What can we all do to help keep our skies dark and our stars bright? And what’s up at McDonald Observatory these days? Listen and find out!
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Transcript for “The Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve”:
Intro
Welcome to the heart of the Big Bend. It’s time to kick back, put your feet up, grab your favorite beverage or snack as we discussed, declare, proclaim, publicize and articulate about the wonders, magic, beauty, music and happenings here in the area known as the Big Bend of Texas.
Chris Ruggia
Hello, welcome and thank you for joining us again for heart of the Big Bend. This is a podcast and radio show coming to you every other week about visiting the beautiful Big Bend of Texas. Specifically, we will cover what’s happening in Alpine, an incredibly friendly, small town nestled in a desert mountain valley at the heart of the Big Bend region. With easy day trips from Alpine, you can take in everything this amazing region has to offer.
I’m Chris Ruggia, Director of Tourism for the City of Alpine, and today I’m joined by Stephen Hummell of McDonald Observatory. Hi, Stephen.
Stephen H
Hi, Chris. Good to be here.
Chris R
Thanks so much. Today we’re going to talk – sort of a follow up episode. If you look back in our podcast feed to one of the first few episodes, little over a year ago, we talked to Bill Wren at the McDonald Observatory about the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve.
Stephen H
Very good, yeah. Got the title right.
Chris R
Been in enough Zoom calls about it, so. At the time, when Bill talked to Heather and I, the Reserve was a proposal. We were trying to get all the ducks lined up and it finally happened. So congratulations to you and to me and to the whole region. So when did it become official?
Stephen H
The Dark Sky Reserve became officially certified in March of this year, so not long ago, about six or so months in.
Chris R
What did we have to get in place? What had to happen for them to agree this is actually a Dark Sky Reserve?
Stephen H
This is not a title that is given easily. It’s a title given by the International Dark Sky Association. They want to see, in any of the dark sky places in order to certify it, its one, it’s actually dark, you have nice, starry skies. So we had to prove that, we had to take measurements of the night sky, lots of photos, lots of evidence to support that.
Chris R
Lots of volunteers and a lot of different places around the region with meters. What’s that called? Dark-0-Meters?
Stephen H
Sky quality meters. I wish it was called Dark-0-Meters. That’d be great.
Chris R
Sky quality meters.
Stephen H
Yeah they’re real devices that you just point them up at the sky, you push a button, it gives you a number and that number tells you how dark it is. We had a small army of volunteers, we could still use more volunteers, actually for taking these measurements.
Chris R
Right so if you want to learn to use a Dark-0-Meter, contact Stephen.
Stephen H
Exactly. We have to take those measurements annually as well, not just for the application, but to keep it up to make sure we’re actually on target and it’s still dark and we can maintain the status.
Chris R
Right. So we establish – okay, it’s dark. Then what else do we have to do?
Stephen H
Then we have to demonstrate community support. That’s a challenging one, kind of vague, basically we had to get letters of support from local residents, all the major stakeholders in the region and demonstrate that people actually want this thing to happen and people will support it. It was actually surprisingly easier than I thought it was going to be. We had over 250 letters of support from people all across the reserve, Mexico, the state of Texas as well who all wanted this to happen so thankfully, that part wasn’t as hard as I feared it would be.
Chris R
Then we need we needed coordinates we needed action, right? From all the governments in the area.
Stephen H
Yes, action – that’s the trickier part. It’s one thing to claim that you have a dark sky, but it’s another thing to preserve it. What we had to do was make sure that all the areas within the Dark Sky reserve have some kind of ordinance in place or some kind of lighting management plan to preserve the night sky. All the four counties within the Reserve – that’s Jeff Davis, Presidio and Brewster County, and a little bit of Reeves county around Balmorhea – all the cities within there had to update their lighting ordinances. They already had them, but we had to update them to make sure they were up to our modern understanding.
Chris R
Just so folks realize, because we went over this with Bill, but this Reserve – you mentioned all these counties. This is the largest right now in the world, and as I understand, the only one that extends across international borders.
Stephen H
Yeah, exactly. The area covered by the Reserve is over 15,000 square miles, which is insane. It’s bigger than several US states and it also includes three protected lands across the river in Mexico.
Chris R
Did you have to work on legal changes of ordinances in Mexico? I don’t know if they’re called ordinances Mexico in Mexico or what the word is there did you have to work with as well?
Stephen H
Yeah we work with CONAP, which is basically the Mexican equivalent of the National Park Service.
Chris R
OK since they’re already protected areas.
Stephen H
Yes, they’re already protected areas. The areas across the river are very sparsely populated, but they subscribe to a lighting management plan. Mexico, fun fact – Mexico is one of two countries in the world that has a federal level light pollution law, the other being France. The city of light, famously. It’s ironic.
Mexico does, they approved it in 2019, 2020, just before the Reserve came into effect. That also helped paved the way and meant we didn’t have to fight so hard at a local level. It was already in place at the national level.
Chris R
Those things happened and then we submit all the documentation and stuff to the International Dark Sky Association. Then we got word back and now we have the certification. What happens now?
Stephen H
We have the title and now we can brag about it, right? Obviously, honestly, bragging rights are the big reason to go for it. We have the biggest and that’s something to be proud of. Thats, I think, a big reason for people to visit the area, of course. I’m proud to live in the biggest Dark Sky Reserve.
Chris R
My wife and I came out, I think the first time we came to the area, that was part of it. She said, “around Fort Davis, I think it’s the darkest skies in the…” some large area, I can’t remember what she told me way back then. Yeah, it drew us.
Stephen H
It’s a big reason people live here; I think a lot of people will be pleased to hear that will continue. But getting the title, that’s just the beginning. We have the lighting management plan, we have the policies we want, we got to follow through on them now. Now comes the harder work of maintaining it. The way you, the listener, can help is just by using a light that’s shielded and aiming it down at your own home, business, whatever you’re doing. Using a light that’s aimed down and amber color goes a long way to protecting the night sky.
Chris R
Let’s be extra clear here – no matter where you live, this is a good thing to do. There’s a couple different aspects to this. One is, pointing light down is where we use it, for one thing. You point a light up at the sky, it’s not actually helping anybody. It’s not making your property safer or easier to see by pointing light up in the sky or into your eyes, for that matter. This is helpful for anybody anywhere, but specifically within our area, that’s something for property owners in Alpine specifically. We just passed the new ordinance – within a few years, three and a half, I think you told me earlier, the ordinance requires night sky-friendly lighting. So you’re going to want to look at your own home and look at the lights on the poles on the buildings and see. If you’re walking around your property at night, what are you looking out for? What are those red flags?
Stephen H
An obvious red flag is if you are, say, across the street from your property, looking across the street and you can see the source of the bulb but it’s kind of aimed out…
Chris R
That bulb is shining into your eye glaring at you.
Stephen H
Yeah. It’s illuminating someone else’s property and it’s not compliant. We would call that light trespass or light pollution, basically.
Chris R
So it’s not just pointed at the stars, it’s pointing at your neighbor’s yard. So this is good neighbor-ness as well as dark sky protection.
Stephen H
Your neighbor may not like it, but they also may not want to confront you about it if they have feelings about it. It’s something I encounter a lot. It’s a neighborly thing to do to make sure your light stays within the bounds of your own property. The other thing to look for is the color. A lot of people get confused about this like, “why does the color really matter?” If you drive through Fort Davis especially, it’s really obvious that all the street lights are orange. Why? A lot of people ask that. Well, the reason we like orange is the same reason the sky is blue in the daytime. Blue light scatters more in the air, it washes out the sky in the day. If you have a white or blue street light, or light at night, it’s going to do the same thing. Blue light’s going to wash out the stars at night. If we use an orange or amber color, it doesn’t scatter as much, even if some of the light does bounce off your pavement or whatever, it still wont’ affect the stars quite so much.
Chris R
Got you. So I’m standing in the store, and I’ve walked around my property and there’s no bulbs shining me in the face. I’m not having to squint looking at my house but the light looks a little blue-ish so I’m wanting to replace that bulb. So I’m standing at the aisle and there’s all these numbers. What am I looking for? What’s the right number?
Stephen H
Yeah, the right number. Well, one easy thing to remember is soft white or amber if it says that on there. Or if it says ‘bug light,’ those are all good.
Chris R
Okay.
Stephen H
Or if it says cool white, or daylight white, then it’s not so good.
Chris R
Gotcha.
Stephen H
But those names are basically all represented by numbers on that Kelvin scale. You want a number that’s 2700 or lower.
Chris R
The lower the better.
Stephen H
The lower the number the better. If it’s 4 or 5,000 that’s a really bright daylight – think like car high beam color. We don’t want that one.
Chris R
I want to – from all the times I talked to Bill Wren about lights, I’m going to channel him a little bit, try to remember some of the things that he told me because the reasons that we want light on our property is we want to be safe, we want to feel like our property’s safe and also we want to be able to see what we’re doing on our property at night. The first thing we imagine when we say, “okay I want to illuminate my property so that I know who’s on there, I want to see what’s going on,” you want it bright as possible, is the first thing you think. But if you see some of these before and after photographs, particularly I want to point out the oil field work that Bill started with some of the companies there. Where you think about a drill site and what you think of is these brilliant, glaring lights and he worked with these companies to lower the light volume. Lower the luminance, I guess, of those bulbs. Get them less bright and shield them so you’re not looking straight at the bulbs. They found, with way less money so they’re spending less on illumination, but it was also way safer. because your eyes gets fatigued when you’re looking at lights. One other thing I wanted to mention is I’ve seen example of, if you’re wanting to light your home because you’re concerned about unwanted people on your property, the best way to be able to see those people is to not be able to see your light bulb. If you’re looking at a glaring light bulb, those light packs are pointed out into the yard, you’re getting blinded by your bulb. Somebody could be standing right next to that light and you wouldn’t see them at all, or behind it. Whereas if you shielded, you get way better view of your property.
Stephen H
It’s counterintuitive. More light doesn’t necessarily equal safer, because your eye is going to adjust to whatever the ambient light levels are. If you have a really high intensity light and it’s dark surrounding it, you may see well in that area, but as soon as you leave that really well lit area, you’re night blind. There could be javelina right in front of you and you wouldn’t see it. It’s happened to me.
Chris R
We’ve scared each other in our driveway, I’ll admit it. Speaking of that intensity, let’s say your average porch light, what kind? We’ve talked abut the color, what about the brightness of the bulb? What’s a good rule of thumb there?
Stephen H
Typically for outdoor residential applications, 800 lumens or lower is good per bulb. What’s a lumen? The more lumens you got, the brighter it is. You’ll see that on every package of light bulb you get. It’ll usually be the first thing you see in bright letters. 800 lumens, 1000, 2000, you don’t need all that much light at night because your eyes adjust so easily. I thin a lot of people don’t even realize how well their eyes adjust because it’s sort of subconscious. If you live in a big city, odds are you’ve never even actually allowed your eyes to adjust to the darkness and really experience what your eyes are capable of. Allowing you to see further into the distance, because you have, again, a really bright light, you may see well right underneath it, but the area further away you can’t see because your eyes aren’t adjusted to it. Super bright lights can decrease the area of your visible range.
Chris R
So anytime you’re at the hardware store, you’re thinking about a light bulb for out of doors, look for that 800 lumens or less. Warm light, 2700 and lower color-wise. Now let’s imagine I want to learn a little more, I’m thinking, I know my fixture needs to be replaced or whatever. What are some resources? Where should people go to learn more about that?
Stephen H
You can go to BigBendDarkSkyReserve.org and that’s a website we’ve got put together, it’s got lots of helpful information. If you’re unclear on any of the terms or you’re looking through the site and the guides and you’re like, I don’t really know if my light is good or not, send us an email. We have a contact page. I’m willing to look at your light whether you live in the area or not, frankly.
Chris R
Take a picture of it and send it to Stephen.
Stephen H
Exactly. Send it to me and I’m happy to help out.
Chris R
Excellent and if you’re in the area, you might even be able to make Stephen a sandwich or something and invite him over. He’ll look at your fixture in person.
Stephen H
Exactly, yeah.
Chris R
That covers what we personally can do towards maintaining and improving even the darkness of our skies so when we look up, we see even more of those stars. The starting point for all of this was McDonald Observatory, which is where, coincidentally, you are employed. Since you’re here, I want to take advantage and find out from you what’s going on at the observatory these days. Who’s studying what, and what’s new?
Stephen H
Our Hobby-Eberly telescope just turned 25 years old earlier this past week. Although maybe 25 years old, it’s basically all new these days. It had a big upgrade back in 2017, and it’s currently involved in creating the largest map of the universe ever made. Looking out to galaxies that are about 11 billion lightyears away. What we’re trying to do is basically construct a giant map, find out why the universe is expanding, and in particular, why it is expanding at an accelerating rate. Distant galaxies are moving away from us at an ever-increasing pace. Whatever is responsible for that, which we don’t know – but whatever it’s doing that – we call ‘dark energy.’ But as we like to say, it might not be dark, and it might not be energy. It’s frankly a placeholder term until we figure out why the universe is expanding. That’s our biggest project going on right now. One of many different projects.
Chris R
So the map is setting a baseline to do further measurements? How is the map going to help us learn about the dark energy, so to speak?
Stephen H
It’s one thing to look at one little spot, of galaxies far away and measure what they’r doing, how fast they’re moving, but we need to know what the universe as a whole, basically, what they’re doing. The grand scale structure of the whole thing as much as we can. We need to take measurements from a huge area of the sky to make sure that something happening over int his one spot isn’t just an anomaly.
Chris R
So as an example, if I’m to understand, in a lot of cases, let’s say if I’m working on measuring a certain body or certain area of the sky. I might take repeated measurements over time and compare those, in this case we’d get a broad breadth and you can compare different areas of the sky. You didn’t have one to one pictures of. Equivalencies there. does that seem right?
Stephen H
Yeah, we want a diverse sample set. We don’t want to look at just one particular kind of object and one particular thing. Astronomers, it’s called a blind survey. We said here’s the area of the sky, we don’t know what’s there and we’re not going to play any favorites. We’re just looking at every thing. The nice side effect of that or coincidence is that we discover a lot of things that nobody even knew to look for. For this study, we designed the instrument to look at galaxies, but it gets stars and everything else there too. One astronomer’s trash is another astronomer’s treasure, so they’re mining that data set and finding all kinds of stuff. We’re finding spectrums of meteors. Sometimes a meteor will just happen to fall in the telescope’s field of view and there actually aren’t a lot of observations of meteors with telescopes because you don’t know where to look. They only last a second or two. We find all sorts of stars and black holes no one knew was there and no one even knew to look for them.
Chris R
Cool. Any other specific new discoveries or questions that are being asked that have come up recently?
Stephen H
Our oldest telescope, our 82-inch telescope, which was built in 1939 was the second-largest one that was built back then. Today, it’s not even the second largest at the observatory, but it’s still an active research telescope and in fact, it’s one of the oldest research telescopes around.
Chris R
That are in active use.
Stephen H
It’s still making discoveries. The reason for that is new instruments to use the telescope effectively. One of the newer instruments we have comes from Texas A&M, we’re attached to UT, but we get along with A&M. It’s looking at planets around other stars. It’s hoping to discover planets that are probably a little bit bigger than the earth, but not by too much that are around stars that are at least somewhat like the sun. Using a telescope that was never used for that purpose. No one thought it could before, but we’re using it in different ways.
Chris R
Excellent. It’s a very opportunistic field, it seems like. You can take advantage of every scrap of light that’s hitting the earth or hitting those devices.
Stephen H
Yep, exactly. Every photon counts.
Chris R
Excellent, so that’s what the scientists who are working there are up to. Then we also have visitors who can come to the Observatory. I want to point people back to that episode back in the feed, so if you get on visitalpinetx.com/podcast and scroll down, you can find that episode where we talked in some detail with Bill Wren about the Visitors Center and Star Parties. Let’s give people a quick overview of the Visitors Center is amazing, you got some new stuff…
Stephen H
You’re definitely encouraged to do that. We’re not just a research facility, we have a lot of public programs. you can come do a daytime tour or attend one of our Star Party programs where you look through some of our telescopes at night and get a tour of the night sky with a laser pointer, which is really cool. We also do solar viewing programs in the day where you take a look at whats happening at the sun. The sun’s been very active lately, lots of cool stuff happening on the sun. Sooner or later, it may actually impact your daily life, which you’ll learn more about in those programs. Check those out at our website as well, mcdonaldobservatory.org. We recommend making reservations.
Chris R
About how far ahead of time do you think you need to sign up?
Stephen H
If there’s any kid of school break, kids are going to be out, then I recommend at least 2-3 months in advance. If it’s a middle of the week, you can probably get away with a week or less, but definitely check the schedules.
Chris R
Well Stephen, thanks so much again for coming to talk to us about the Dark Sky Reserve, which you’ve done some great work on and continue to, so thank you for all of that. Thanks for sharing with us about the Observatory as well.
Stephen H
Thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
Chris R
Thank all of you for joining us for Heart of the Big Bend every other week. You can get more information about Heart of the Big Bend at visitalpinetx.com/podcast or search for Heart of the Big Bend on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast apps. And for all of you guys, listening to us on KALP/KVLF radio in Alpine, we’ll see you in two Fridays.
Outro
You’ve been listening to the heart of the Big Bend. Hope you liked what you heard and that you’ll find the time to experience all that the Big Ben has to offer. See you soon, partner.