Minimizing light pollution
What is light pollution?
Light pollution is caused by excessive artificial lighting, which does not only obscure our view of the night sky (about 50% of all Europeans live in areas where it is already impossible to observe the Milky Way with the naked eye) but also inflicts great damage on nocturnal life.
Experts guess, that about 450 insects die every night in any given, old- fashioned street light, furthermore the natural activity patterns of other nocturnal animals such as frogs are greatly disturbed. Even birds can be caught in the light of high-rise buildings, get disoriented and collide with the structures, leading to so-called "tower kills".
Ground lights like this greatly contribute
to the problem of light pollution
Even plants suffer from excessive lighting: broad-leafed trees which are directly illuminated e.g. by a street light tend to loose their leaves later in the year, making them more vulnerable to frost damages.
How does AUBELE help to minimize light pollution?
As a general rule, only those areas that actually need lighting should be illuminated. Aside from that, light should never be shone directly into the sky. Since LEDs allow a much better focusing of light, they are indeed the ideal choice when it comes to environmental-friendly lighting.
HarzOptics uses the software tool DIALux
to plan low-light pollution environments