Astro-Tourism & Light Pollution in Tanzania

Protect our Dark Skies from Light Pollution and Attract Astro-Tourists

By Dr Noorali T Jiwaji,

Faculty of Sci Tech & Env Stud, Dept Physical Sciences, OUT

noorali.jiwaji@out.ac.tz and ntjiwaji@yahoo.com

Light pollution denies people their long-standing natural heritage to view stars. This problem is acute in the developed world where there is an extremely high concentration of lights, a lot of which point upwards into space. In Tanzania we are lucky to have large areas where there are no artificial lights and extremely dark skies. We have an opportunity to protect the night skies by sensible use of lights.

In our cities we are already on our way to destroying the light environment of our skies. For example, in Dar es Salaam we can see hardly less than one tenth of the stars that we used to see twenty years ago. We used to be told that stars are uncountable, but if you go out at night in a city, even on a moonless night, and you will see large spaces of bright sky between stars and you can count only about 50 stars. In a completely dark sky our eyes can see 3,000 stars. Such a number would be difficult to count because one can easily lose count in the jumble of closely packed stars.

As we continue to develop we cannot avoid increasing the number of lights in urban areas. However, by making the correct choices of light fittings that do not allow light to shine upwards towards the skies, we can develop sensibly and control light pollution. This will allow our skies to remain dark and enable everyone, including future generations, to enjoy the beauty of abundant stars.

By protecting from this type of pollution we can attract astro-tourists from the westernized world where light-pollution has completely blanketed their view of stars. They will be attracted to come and view the stars from our country because of our conducive climate and clear skies. Our location near the equator allows viewers to see nearly 90% of the stars in one night dusk to dawn. We thus have unique opportunity to attract astro-tourists to bring in extra revenue to add to our economy.

Dark-sky parks can be established where use of lighting is controlled by laws that prevent light pollution. We have vast expanses to choose from, since most areas in our country are not yet touched by light-pollution. To achieve this we first have to create a light pollution map of our country. There is an ongoing campaign to determine the light pollution of status worldwide.

By joining the Globe at Night Campaign, which is a worldwide citizen-led effort where ordinary people participate to gather night sky conditions above their areas. The data they submit are used to document light pollution around the world and create a light pollution map of the world.

By participating in this campaign, we will be able to get enough information to create our own dark sky database that will allow us to demarcate dark-sky zones, after which more detailed measurements can be made in selected areas. This will lead to identification of possible suitable dark-sky areas that can be converted to Dark-Sky parks with legal protection.

This is a simple citizen-science undertaking where ordinary people help to collect data of national consequence

Join the 6th worldwide GLOBE at Night 2011 campaign now going on from Feb. 21 to March 6

“The GLOBE at Night program is an international citizen-science campaign to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution by encouraging everyone everywhere to measure local levels of night sky brightness and contribute observations online to a world map.” (http://www.globeatnight.org/)

Follow these Five Easy Star-Hunting Steps:

1) Find your latitude and longitude = ask at your local school or government office.

2) Find Orion by going outside an hour after sunset

ORION is a group of stars consisting of four stars forming a rectangle and three stars close together along its diagonal. You will see it Overhead about 7-10pm local time.

3) Match your nighttime sky to one of our magnitude charts(Click to see chart1 and to see chart2)

4) Report your observation. (Send an SMS to 0713517009 or email to ntjiwaji@yahoo.com and give:

(a) the name of your observing place,

(b) your latitude and longitude,

(d) clouds – overcast, cloudy, clear skies, and

You can also report your observations directly on the website: http://www.globeatnight.org/report.html on a very user friendly webpage

5) Compare your observation to thousands around the world. http://www.globeatnight.org/analyze.html

END - OUT