World experts prepare the first report for the United Nations on regulation of light pollution and mitigating the impact of satellite constellations

Credit: Daniel López
Advertised on

After a week of intense work, with the participation of almost a thousand researchers from all over the world, the online workshop “Dark and quiet skies for science and society” has finished. For five days work has proceded on the preparation of a document which can offer governments, city councils, and companies the legal and technical basis for avoiding the possible negative impact of the newest technology on the observation of the night sky, and on biodiversity.

During each day of the week a team of world experts has presented, analyzed, and discussed one of the problems currently facing astronomical observations, especially those due to the negative impact of artificial night lighting and satellite constellations in areas such as optical and radio astronomy, and night-time ecosystems. The result is that the five working groups taking part in the meeting have prepared a single preliminary report which has been released this afternoon during the final session of the meeting.

In this first meeting solutions were proposed which will be debated and submitted for approval to the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). “The recommendations will be made known to world political leaders, presenting our report to the United Nations Commission on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, COPUOS, in which over 90 countries are represented” explains Casiana Muñoz-Tuñón, the Deputy Director of the IAC and one of the organizers of this workshop.

The report, which will soon be available on the website of the workshop is still a document under development to be improved, as Muñoz-Tuñón said “ We invite all the experts who have participated to keep on providing commentaries and suggestions during the preparation of the final version of the report: the contributions from all of them is essential to make this an effective document, shared by a wide community”

A special closure session

Today’s session was attended by Pedro Duque, the Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation, via video, who introduced the last workshop of the day about the protection of Radioastronomy, a branch of Astronomy under threat form radio signals produced by techical development.

Duque stressed the importance of the protection of the sky, which has been carried out in the Canaries for years, which has allowed the presence of “scientific activity at the highest level”, and he picked out the importance of the Canary Observatories which “contains some of the most advanced telescopes in the world, such as the Gran Telescopio Canarias dn the Cherenkov telescopes of the CTA-North”.

This online meeting, organized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), with the collaboration of NOIRLab, will finalize with a conference which we hope to celebrate in La Palma in mid-April 2021, during which the final document with recommendations will be made public.

More information:

Workshop "Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society"

Link to the talks on YouTube

Contact:

Casiana Muñoz-Tuñón: subdireccion [at] iac.es

Related projects
STARS4ALL Project
STARS4ALL- A Collective Awareness Platform for Promoting Dark Skies in Europe

WHY: 2015 has been named by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (light2015.org). Light has had many obvious benefits for human mankind, but it also poses some relevant threats: the everyday-increasing excess of light thrown by humans to the sky seriously threatens to remove forever one of humanity’s natural wonders, the view of

Miquel
Serra Ricart
Related news
Dark & Quiet Skies

Even though the conference planned by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for celebration in La Palma has been postponed until mid-April 2021, the meeting is being held on-line from 5th to 9th October. In this workshop we will discuss a reference document for governments, city councils and companies so that they have a legal and technical basis to avoid the possible negative impact of the new technologies on the observation of the night sky and on biodiversity. Link to the programme: http://research.iac.es/congreso/quietdarksky2020/pages/program.php For thousands of years the

Advertised on
Milky way on the Gran Telescopio Canarias

“Astronomical observations have to be protected against light pollution. Only in this way will we be able to see the Universe at at the very beginning”. This was the start of the talk by Casiana Muñoz-Tuñón, Deputy Director of the IAC and one of the organizers of the workshop “Dark and quiet skies for science and society” which is being celebrated on line from October 5th to 9th. Muñoz-Tuñón reminded us that the further back in time we want to reach, the further away we need to look. “For that reason the light which reaches us is very faint. We need dark skies to be able to detect and study

Advertised on