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- Hacker News
- All the car headlights for new cars in Canada are LED and it makes driving at night painful and dangerous. So many times I’ve been nearby blinded by them and I can’t see anything ahead. And it actually physically causes me pain.
- I'm optimistic this won't be a problem in 10-20 years (I agree that's a long time). We have the technology in matrix headlights that were banned in the US and basically in Canada up until a few years ago. I expect to see kits on Amazon in a few years for retrofits. Since they need a camera and some brains they will likely start at many hundreds of dollars but that should come down.by bahmboo
- But is that the fault of the LED? That sounds like the fault of whoever calibrated the LEDs' brightness and directionality.
If the beams were the right brightness and pointed downwards, we wouldn't be having this issue.
by yonatan8070 - Since I picked up a Pixel phone, I've been doing some amateur astrophotgraphy, and mostly from the balcony at my apartment.
However, I live in a built-up urban area, and my home is absurdly light-polluted. Like, you wouldn't believe it! The parking lot here is ringed with flood lamps that are aimed into our windows. So every hundred feet or so, there is a bright-as-the-Sun lamp in my face, and with a clear view, I can spot about five of them.
So from my balcony, my only hope to get some darkness for the camera is to get into shadows. The railings provide a band of shadows that I can use to block the floods from getting on my lens. So if I position the camera juuust right, it kinda feels darker than it is, and I've got to say I've captured some impressive starfields, down to magnitude 9 or dimmer, including bodies such as Uranus and 4 Vesta.
I also found that the ballcourts in the rear of my property provide this unique "cave" situation with lots of shadows where I can capture the sky directly overhead, and to the west. This is how I photographed the last lunar eclipse.
Now that's my view to the west and 225° (due southwest). If I go on the other side of the property to look east, I've got the same crazy situation with flood lamps, but there's basically no way to hide in shadows. I literally cannot photograph anything rising in the east if it is dimmer than the Moon.
So really, my astronomy hobby mostly consists of doing some great editing, curation, identification, and mostly simulation from the comfort of the air-conditioned indoors. I enjoy what sightings I can while outdoors, and that's included some meteors, the ISS, Tiangong, and a few Vandenberg launches. We're still hanging in there!
- I've started doing this in my home. All lights are smart LEDs. At 8pm, they shift warm, 80%. From 9pm-10pm, they go from 80% to 0%. At 7am, they start going from 0% to 100% cool (I work from home and it helps with focus).
Having my environment reflect the patterns of nature has really been a nice change.
by hectdev - I do something similar with my exterior lights - at sunset my lights come on at ~1% at 2000K. If they detect motion (in my driveway or back deck) they go up to 100% at 2700K. At sunrise they turn off.
Note that bulbs exist that automatically warm as they dim - so in my case the switches are smart, but the bulbs themselves are all dumb.
by Marsymars - I'm surprised it didn't suggest using red LEDs without phosphorescence, which has several advantages:
1. Red light preserves your dark adaptation
2. It doesn't have as much of an impact on your circadian rythm
3. Not using phosphorescence can increase the lifetime of the light, since you don't have to worry about the coating degrading
4. Red light is less energetic, so could potentially use less power.
5. Since an LED without phosphorescence is a single wavelength, telescopes (and binoculars) can use a narrow band filter to filter out the light pollution, without blocking most of the light from celestial objects.
by thayne - I think people focus far too much on the temperature of LED street lights and rarely on the CRI. The night will still feel odd and "soulless" even with 2700k LED street lamps so long as they're still the absolute worst CRI.
Dare I argue even I would choose 6500k LED street lights with decent CRI over poor CRI 2700K LED lamps any day.
- Sodium vapor lamps didn't exactly have high CRI eitherby krackers
- > The night will still feel odd and "soulless" even with 2700k LED street lamps so long as they're still the absolute worst CRI.
What makes you say that the CRI causes the lack of soul? I'm not saying that you're wrong, but given that CRI is objectively better than it ever was now, why?
The sodium lamps we used previously had a CRI of 25-35. The absolute worst white LEDs we have have a CRI of at least 60.
by tredre3 - Our city recently went on a crusade on replacing all of the high pressure sodium bulbs with LEDs, with the justifications of driving safety and energy savings. I agree that these are important, but the LED bulbs they chose are actively hostile to homes and pedestrians. They are blinding. You can't look at them. I have one outside our house in the main viewing angle and we need to close our shades as soon as they are turned on.by binarymax
- :rock: + :slingshot:by culi
- Back in the day the city installed a new streetlight that blinded anyone sitting on the front porch of my grandparents' house, which they liked to do in the evening. So Granddad got out a painter's pole and rolled some white paint onto the side that faced his house. Problem solved and no one ever said anything.by pelotron
- > Thorp notes that modern CCTV cameras are “pretty great” even at low-light levels, while harsh light makes it hard for both human eyes and digital sensors to see.
That’s a weird thing to include. That sounds like an argument _for_ more aggressive lights. I didn’t expect to see a “think of the surveillance system”
by dgellow - Their prime audience for change are governments...by WarmWash
- Even then, couldn't you just use IR cameras with IR lights for illumination. I'm sure that comes with it's own set of issues, but strictly speaking is better for maximising surveillance while minimising human impactby mghackerlady
- If your goal is to reduce light pollution, addressing/deflecting the concerns of the surveillance state is probably more likely to get you to that goal than ignoring the concerns entirely or tying yourself to the omnicauseby pjl0
- > That’s a weird thing to include. That sounds like an argument _for_ more aggressive lights. I didn’t expect to see a “think of the surveillance system”
One of the biggest excuses for ultra-bright streetlights is crime prevention (usually shortly followed by CCTV). I'm not really sure why we continue to indulge that point of view, but if one is indulging it...
by swiftcoder - > “… gives the illusion, without the reality, of safety”
This actually isn’t true. Having done physical security work before, a weird fact is that one of the best physical deterrents is lighting; even over CCTV.
I don’t say that to take away from this, this is great work and I’d love to see the lighting toned down for multiple reasons. However, this should be framed as a security tradeoff not an outright win.
Source: The Impact and Policy Relevance of Street Lighting for Crime Prevention: A Systematic Review Based on a Half-Century of Evaluation Research (https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/wl9zqxga/release/1)
by dwoosley - Driving down the road past a police cruiser on the side with it's lights on is far from safe. The escalation of brightness makes them visible beyond anything else...like the road.by LanceH
- I once lived in a city that had replaced street lights that cast light in a circle with modernised ones that cast a sharply delimited rectangle of light on the road, and didn't waste light in other directions.
The thing was, the roads of this city were arranged as a footpath, then a grassed area with trees, then the lights, then the roadway. Only after the city had rolled out thousands of these lights did someone notice the footpaths were now much darker. And also the footpaths were quite uneven, due to the trees' roots - a problem the lights had previously been keeping under control.
It's now common, in winter, to see groups jogging on the road.
by michaelt - Get rid of cars and they'd take down all the lights.by Finnucane
- Over here, joggers are frequently wearing headlamps to illuminate their way. Often combined with a light on their back. They can see and can be seen, which is safe.by Rotundo
- Planners forgetting that pedestrians exist is sadly a common occurrenceby wongarsu
- We need much better engineering standards if we are going to fix night lighting. A simplistic lux-on-the-ground measure combined with cost minimization produces a few lights, with bare bulbs, up hight, with brutal intensity. These are all things that produce glare directly on the eyeball.
You need much less light on the ground if the eyeball itself has no direct line to the hottest part of the lights. Instead, the night-blindness caused by excessive bare lighting is "fixed" by adding more fill lights for the shadows caused by the first lights. Classic addictive behaviour.
by michael1999 - I believe that is what TFA is about.by projektfu
- Where I live, we have a small park, 500m away. You need to walk through it if you want to get to the city center from the small neighborhood we live in. To protect the wildlife, the lighting system has presence sensors, so as you walk or bicycle through the park, the way/street lighting turns on, you can walk, and just after you, it turns dark again. Really cool, especially the first time I went through it in the middle of the night.by Loic
- Serious question: Wouldn't it be better to just have them always be on with red light that is much less disruptive to wildlife?by snarf21
- Would prefer very dim or red lighting. Also preserves your night visionby redlewel
- Wouldn't it be more reasonable to just expect people who want to walk places in the dead of night to wear a headlamp? They're cheap, easy to recharge, and can be adjusted for various brightness levels.by trollbridge