Spreading the News about Light Pollution Worldwide
We have just added Japanese, Mandarin and Turkish versions of our popular short show Losing the Dark. That brings the language count to eleven, with more to come! The show is free for download and is available for both fulldome and classic theaters, science educators, informal outreach professionals—anyone who wants to teach the public about light pollution issues. You can preview the show in English both here and at the International Dark-Sky Association’s Losing the Dark page.
Losing the Dark is a “public service announcement” planetarium show, a collaboration between Loch Ness Productions and the International Dark-Sky Association, and generously funded by Star-map.fr, the Fred Maytag Family Foundation, the International Planetarium Society, and individual members of IDA. It introduces and illustrates some of the issues regarding light pollution, and suggests three simple actions people can take to help mitigate it. The show gives planetarium professionals a tool to help educate the public about the problems of light pollution. Planetarians are uniquely positioned to teach audiences ways we can all work together to implement responsible use of lighting. We made the show available in fulldome format and in flatscreen for use in classic theaters, classrooms, lecture halls, and other venues.
Since IDA is an international group, we got to work producing the show in other languages and the response has been phenomenal. It’s currently available in U.S. English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Still to come are Cantonese, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese.
Check out Losing the Dark, download it, show it to people, and help spread the word about mitigating light pollution!
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