With days growing shorter and darkness falling earlier, I’ve been enjoying the wonderful views of our night skies here in Harpswell. While it’s true that there’s some glow from nearby towns — the bright lights at Cook’s Corner and the distant glows of Portland and Bath — here in Harpswell, we can still discern the Milky Way in our night sky.
I’d like to thank Harpswell’s leaders for their care to reduce the glow from the few streetlights we have here with the change of Harpswell’s streetlights to energy-efficient, low-color-temperature LED lights that minimize light pollution. (The color temperature is 2200 Kelvin, a lighting level that falls in the “warmer” range.) Harpswell became the first municipality in Maine to install these low-color-temperature lights, which follow the DarkSky International (darksky.org) recommendations to help preserve night skies.
I’d like to encourage everyone to use this season of early nightfall to take a look at the information available at darksky.org and make efforts to change any outdoor lighting that might compete with our starry night skies.
Gina Snyder, Great Island
