You’ve traded that stale overhead office fluorescent for the warm lights of your home. Instead of too-white, too-bright desk spotlights and screens, you are working from home and illuminating your desk or table with natural sunlight or some warm-tone lamps. There’s no argument that your home’s lighting is more comfortable than most offices — but that calming spectrum of light may be wreaking havoc on your at-home productivity. 

A recent study from the University of Toledo suggests that blue light from digital devices as well as the sun transform vital molecules in the sun’s retina into cell killers, according to phys.org. 

Harmful blue light is not just a threat to light pollution and sleeping habits. New safety guidelines from the American Petroleum Institute (API) suggests that light sources that disrupt circadian rhythms should be minimized. 

“Blue light” refers to a specific wavelength within the spectrum of visible light that appears blue or violet. Compared to other colors like red, orange, and yellow, blue light has a much shorter wavelength, meaning it produces higher amounts of energy. 

When baby sea turtles hatch, their first instinct is to head toward the moonlight reflecting on the water’s surface — a natural waypoint that leads them to the sea. Hatchlings are drawn to the brightest thing they see, and in developed areas the brightest thing is no longer the moon, but the street and hotel lights.

This disorients the baby turtles and leads many of them away from the ocean, causing dehydration, starvation, and an increased chance of getting eaten. 

Mauna Kea is one of the most important locations in the astronomy world. Located on the main island of Hawaii, Mauna Kea is a million-year-old dormant volcano. With its peak reaching 13,803 feet above sea level, Mauna Kea is the world’s tallest volcano, making it the perfect spot to host some of the greatest telescope and astronomical observatories ever created. 

Twice a year more than 5 million birds from at least 250 different species fly through the city of Chicago alone as they head toward Canada in the spring and return south toward Central and South America in the fall. Though beautiful, the Windy City’s skyline can prove fatal to a number of birds who collide with glass-covered or illuminated buildings. 

Studies have estimated at least 100 million bird deaths related to light pollution in cities throughout the United States per year, and some estimates put that number closer to one billion deaths per year. 

Compared to traditional lighting practices, LED lighting yields a wide variety of advantages. In today’s markets, there are many lighting options at businesses’ disposal. However, LEDs offer improvements in every regard, making them the light source of choice for warehouses, parking lots, offices, streetlights and more. 

We’ve gone into great detail before about the major differences between LEDs and halogen, incandescent, and CFL lights. Now, we’ll determine all the advantages to switching your office, warehouse, or commercial building to LED lighting.  

The Dark-Sky Movement is a worldwide campaign to reduce light pollution. The movement's goal is to decrease light pollution in order to preserve the natural night sky. 

Since our initial discovery of light pollution, amateur and professional astronomers alike have worked towards protecting the night sky. Faced with the unstoppable expansion of urbanization, astronomers began making efforts to reduce the effects of city lighting and skyglow. Today, the movement is stronger than ever and continues to fight for more responsible lighting practices. 

The greatest threat to amateur astronomy today is the unreasonably excessive growth of severe light pollution. Because most cities demand effective lighting above all else, the harmful impacts of such extreme sources of light pollution have been neglected. What’s more unfortunate, we’ve forgotten the beauty and grandeur of the milky way--we’ve become accustomed to the starless sky. The issue has become less noticeable and therefore, less of a priority. For both amateur and professional astronomers, however, the level of modern-day light pollution is intolerable.

Did you know that light pollution has a substantially harmful impact on wildlife? For billions of years, all plants and animals have developed definitive rhythms based on the unchanging day, night, and seasonal cycles. These rhythms dictate crucial animal behaviors such as sleeping, reproduction, and predation. Within the last hundred years, however, these cycles have been drastically disrupted by the growth of humanity’s artificial night-time lighting.