Study to Shine Light on Nighttime Skies at Parks By Michael Doyle Modesto Bee - October 23, 2000 WASHINGTON -- Federal scientists are eyeballing vanishing night skies at parks such as Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, in hopes they can restore at least some of nature's nocturne. Following up on a groundbreaking private study that identified "light pollution" as a problem in some of the nation's most popular parks, the National Park Service is expanding its survey of the issue. After studying light pollution in California parks last year, the agency is starting to look at the same problem nationwide. "We're walking into an area that the park service has virtually no data on," said Chad Moore, a physical scientist at Pinnacles National Monument. The new studies will extend to at least eight national parks the kind of analysis Moore initiated at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Pinnacles, Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks. Funded by the increased fees paid since 1996 by visitors to Yosemite and other major parks, Moore will scoop up data in several ways. Observers will track individual stars of known brightness, photograph the night lights arising from nearby cities, use special digital cameras to photograph the night sky and point an instrument called a photometer skyward. This instrument counts the pinging of photons, or units of light. In a sky congested by artificial light, the stars seem to fade. "If you don't see a star, it's not because it's dim," Moore said. "It's because it's drowned out by the background." The night-light studies could guide park officials as they try to cloak the man-made light pouring out of everything from soda machines to gas stations. At Yosemite, for instance, the park's consultants found unshielded outdoor lights, indoor building lights seeping into the night and plain old energy inefficiency. "We feel that the night sky is an important aspect of the visitor experience," Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. "In a place like Yosemite Valley, you certainly need light for safety, but in all of our planning, we also want to minimize light and optimize the night sky." Moore, 29, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, said he's going to have to collect better data from Sequoia and Kings Canyon to augment what was gathered this year. He said he initially began "tinkering around with different ways to measure light pollution" at the Pinnacles monument south of Salinas. It seemed interesting enough that he thought the park service might fund him with a research grant. "The first year I submitted it, there wasn't a lot of interest," Moore said. "The second year, they not only accepted it, they expanded it." The apparent difference came from the April 1999 publication of a study by the private National Parks and Conservation Association. That study, titled Vanishing Night Skies, was the first nationwide survey of light pollution problems as perceived by park managers. Nearly two-thirds of the park managers told surveyors they considered light pollution a resource problem.