“That’s part of what really keeps me stoked,” Oey says. “For me, the environmental benefits seem almost more important than the astronomical ones. It seems as though every study is finding that there’s some kind of significant impact of lights on the ecosystem, and that’s why I’m alarmed.”

But here’s the good news. “Fixing the light pollution problem is relatively easy to do. Once you turn out or shield the lights, you’ve solved the problem,” Oey says. “It’s not like climate change, where even if we turn off all the carbon emissions right now, the globe still would continue to heat up for a while. With lights, as soon as you’ve covered them up, that’s it.

"Light pollution is easily reversible."

Community Constellations

Instead of more lighting, Oey argues for smart lighting. In the past year, she’s rallied LSA students, faculty, Michigan residents, birdwatchers, architects, environmentalists, and others to join the Michigan Dark Skies group. The group calls for environmentally aware lighting, which can boost human health and safety, eliminate energy waste, and restore the ecosystem. Their major message: Illuminate only what you need and only when you need it.

“It started because I’d been teaching this course for upper-level astronomy majors at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona,” Oey says. “We spend a month at Kitt Peak; it’s fantastic. As part of this course, we talk about what it takes to build and run an observatory, which includes what our responsibilities are to stakeholders of the observatory—and that includes the local communities,” she says.

Tucson is the biggest city near the Kitt Peak observatory, and Oey usually invites someone from the city government to talk about dark skies and the impact of the observatory on the local economy. She also invites someone from the International Dark-Sky Association, headquartered in Tucson, to talk with the students and city councilperson. “So the students get to meet these people and find out more about the whole dark-sky issue themselves.”

When the class returned to Ann Arbor in June 2017, Oey says, “there was this announcement in MLive that the Ann Arbor City Council just passed a resolution that they were going to spend a million dollars to replace the Kerrytown neighborhood’s globe lights with more of the same.