Norman — For the last two weeks, Norman North High School astronomy students have been counting the stars of Orion — adding up to three or four on a clear night — and trekking around Norman, searching for a dark oasis shielded from the lights of University of Oklahoma’s stadium and downtown.
The students — steered by Norman North astronomy teacher Eileen Grzybowski — have collected readings throughout Norman as part of Globe Night 2010, a worldwide campaign to fight light pollution — known to affect safety, energy conservation, wildlife and the ability to view the stars.
The campaign ends Tuesday with a full moon.
Every night, since March 3 — weather permitting — the students have driven around Norman, pulling over to determine the darkness of the locale’s sky by counting the number of stars in Orion’s constellation and recording results from their Star Quality meters, which gives a qualitative reading of the sky’s darkness: The higher the number, the darker the sky.
The measurements are submitted online on the Globe at Night’s Web site. Organizers will release a map of light pollution levels worldwide in a few weeks.
During the last four Globe at Night campaigns, volunteers from more than 100 nations have contributed to 35,000 measurements, according to a news release.
“Just don’t try to count them during a game because the Stoops troops won’t allow you to see them,” said Haley Smith, Norman North junior and Astronomy II student, who named Washington Elementary and anywhere beyond 48th Street untainted by Norman’s light show.
“It’s pretty bad here,” she said.
In fact, Grzybowski said it’s so bad that a pilot has reported spotting Norman from the Arkansas border, while in the air.
And with half the world’s population living in cities, she said many have never seen an intensely dark sky — one that bathes gazers in starlight, not flashlight.
“It’s an appreciation of our heritage. It’s beautiful to see the night sky in all its glory,” said Grzybowski, adding that the stories of the constellations play like a rerun of a daytime soap opera. “We’re just asking people to consider what they’re doing.”
Grzybowski said the class is Norman’s outside agitators to the city for the issue of light pollution, encouraging City Council to preserve the night sky by passing lighting ordinances, such as turning off the OU stadium lights when not in use and placing shields over neighborhood street lights to direct the light down instead of up.
“If a street light points up, it kind of defeats the purpose of one anyway,” said Brooklyn Johnston, a junior at Norman North and one of Grzybowski’s Astronomy II students, who can see the haze of Norman’s light stream along the horizon from her country porch near Lake Thunderbird.
“We waste a lot of energy when it goes up into the sky.”
The group plans to make its presentation to City Council soon, but a specific date hasn’t been determined, said Ashley Stokes, a Norman North junior and Astronomy II student, as she demonstrated the group’s street lamp proposal, showing on a neighborhood model how when a shield is placed over a flashlight — symbolizing a street lamp — the light is directed downward, rather than up while still illuminating the roads.
Last year, the students created two light pollution maps of Norman from readings of 476 sites.
This year, however, Mother Nature’s temperament, which the students are at the mercy of, clocked the class’ readings at 30, as of Friday.
“The weather has not been good to us,” Grzybowski said.
Nanette Light 366-3541 nlight@normantranscript.com
