Category: Light Pollution

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New LED streetlights

A big change as last week, the old lights were replaced with LED.

It’s very frustrating that this happened without any questions or communication. It’s even my impression that the municipality Hoegaarden does not even know about it. It seems that Fluvius is doing this all in silence.

So an opportunity was missed, to get decent light fixtures. It´s not all bad. Tjoyfhbthey seem brighter, the light color is more yellow. Also they project their light not as far in the gardens as the old fixtures.

The overall light pollution sideways and upwards seems to be improved; Below two pictures from the all-sky camera that give an impression.

Old situation with Metal-Halide lamps HID, resulting in two big intrusions, the light at left is 37 meters from the camera, and a few meters below it. For the source at the right, it’s 39 meters. There is a third light at only 20 meters to the NNW but it is shielded by my house. You can see it lighting our neighbour’s house to the N.
A picture in similar conditions with the NEW streetlights. Only the light in the ENE is directly visible, the light intrusion is a lot less. Also the house to the North is not illuminated anymore.

What’s the impact on SQM? with a clear sky and humidity around 80%, there is still a jump on SQM after midnight – when the lights go out. The SQM measurement jumps from 20.05 to 20.30 which is considerable (SQM is a logarithmic scale).

A gif displaying the image a few minutes before, and the image a few minutes after midnight. Despite the new LED fixtures it’s clear that there is still a large impact of light pollution.
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Racing Meldert shields lights

Since last summer, the local football club changed over to LED, sponsored by the community.

However the lights were unshielded. Not acceptable for an astro observatory that depends on dark skies….!

So I asked for shielding.

And since a little while the shields are installed!

It´s not a miracle solution, but it helps. I´ll still have to wait untill they switch off for any serieus imaging.

For now, lights are on only three evenings till 22hrs.

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