THE SKY THIS DECEMBER: ONE PERSON'S BEAUTY, ANOTHER'S POLLUTION

Well astronomers finally predicted a meteor shower which turned out to be good this fall. The Leonid meteor "storm" turned out to be a milder "shower" for the Midwest, but still one of the best I have seen. Since I live in ideal, dark conditions my family and I saw several dozen bright meteors in a 45 minute period early on the morning of the 17th. Several were bright enough to cast our shadows on the ground.

This month the winter constellations begin to dominate the sky. Mighty Orion rises in the East around 9 p.m. preceded by Taurus the Bull and the Pleiades star cluster. The winter Milky Way stretches nearly overhead from way out in a galaxy shaped like a flattened disk.

There are two very red stars this month. Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion and Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. These are red super giant stars and if we replaced our Sun with one of these, they would be large enough to engulf the Earth. The Big Dipper slowly emerges from the northeast while Cygnus the Swan, or the Northern Cross, stands almost upright in the Northwest.

December the 21st marks the winter solstice which means we have the least amount of daylight and the Sun has reached its southern most journey in the sky. From then on the days will become longer. It still impresses me how the temperature of the Earth is so out of phase with the length of sunlight we receive.

Several people called me asking about good locations to observe last month's meteor shower and commented on the bright skies of urban Cape Girardeau. Unfortunately, there are no public parks or locations within easy drive of the city where stargazers can enjoy dark skies and few trees.

While the public is aware of natural resources like the wetlands, and endangered species, few people realize that dark skies are also a natural resource of rural America. Few of us get the chance to look at the night sky under conditions that our ancestors had because of the high degree of light pollution in modern civilization.

Many cities in the Southwest, where astronomy is part of the local economy, have adopted strict dark sky ordinances. These include restrictions on outdoor, aesthetic lighting, the use of reflectors which direct the light downward, and the use of low pressure sodium lights instead of high pressure sodium or mercury lights.

The next time there is heavy fog in the area and you drive by a billboard, look at the amount of light that misses the billboard. In many cases the majority of the light is wasted and simply scatters in the atmosphere where it becomes pollution for astronomers, professional and amateur.

I read recently, Lights OK'd for New Bridge, in the June 26 edition of the Southeast Missourian. The article said that the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce's proposal to MoDOT includes the cost of lighting the new Bill Emerson memorial bridge ($433,000) in its bid costs.

The proposal came from the beautification committee and the idea was that the bridge would be so beautiful that people would journey from miles around to view the bridge and, while here, spend money and help the economy.

It only takes a moment's thought to realize that the thin cables supporting the bridge will not intercept very much of the light and most of the light will be pumped up into the sky.

One person's aesthetic beauty is another's pollution. This will noticeably brighten the skies around the Cape Girardeau area for miles around. Our dark sky resources, once lost, will be almost impossible to reclaim. On a clear night, from my backyard, I can already see the glow from St. Louis over 100 miles away.

Protecting our dark skies would require a community effort. I wish we could use that $433,000 to seed the construction of a science center in Cape Girardeau, maybe with a planetarium. There isn't one of these (planetarium) in the entire bootheel area. This would surely draw visitors who would in fact spend some dollars. But more importantly it would help bring awareness of science and technology to the area and help us appreciate one of our vanishing natural resources, the dark night sky.

For more information you can contact the International Dark-Sky Association at http://www.darksky.org.

~Dr. Michael Cobb is an astronomer and chairman of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University.