Don't Forget To Look Up!

Did you know there is an International Dark-Sky Association? Well there is! And it’s a global organisation that stretches from North America to New Zealand. The IDA states the sky is, “one half of the entire planet’s natural environment.”
 
Their award-winning International Dark Sky Places (IDSP) Program was founded in 2001 to encourage communities, parks and protected areas around the world to preserve and protect dark sites through responsible lighting policies and public education. This program offers five types of designation:

1. International Dark Sky Communities
   Communities are legally organised cities and towns that adopt quality outdoor lighting ordinances and undertake efforts to educate residents about the importance of dark skies.
2. International Dark Sky Parks
   Parks are publicly- or privately-owned spaces protected for natural conservation that implement good outdoor lighting and provide dark sky programs for visitors.
3. International Dark Sky Reserves
   Reserves consist of a dark “core” zone surrounded by a populated periphery where policy controls are enacted to protect the darkness of the core.
4. International Dark Sky Sanctuaries
   Sanctuaries are the most remote (and often darkest) places in the world whose conservation state is most fragile.
5. Urban Night Sky Places
   UNSPs are sites near or surrounded by large urban environs whose planning and design actively promote an authentic nighttime experience in the midst of significant artificial light at night, and that otherwise do not qualify for designation within any other International Dark Sky Places category.

There are currently 195 certified IDSPs in the world, which you can see on the interactive map here: interactive map.
 
For millennia, the night sky has been a source of wonder, mystery and guidance.
Ada Blair is a psychotherapist, student of ecopsychology. (Ecopsychology is distinguished from conventional psychology as it focuses on studying the emotional bond between humans and the Earth.) Ada is also a regular visitor of the Isle of Sark, which is the smallest of the four main Channel Islands. Sark is a designated Dark Sky Community, where cars and street lights are banned, helping to make the perfect environment for viewing the night sky.
 
The fields of ecopsychology and environmental psychology look at how encounters with nature may be beneficial and transformative and Ada was interested to understand more about how the inhabitants of Sark felt about and responded to their incredible night sky. What she discovered through her quantitative research was:

1. Residents placed a high level of value and enjoyment on observing the night sky and feel that this strengthened family/community connection. “last summer we were lying on the field outside the Island Hall with everybody looking up during the meteor shower … people had sleeping bags, thermoses and hot chocolate. … It was brilliant … everybody was getting so much enjoyment out of it.” “Did you see the Milky Way above the Seignurie last night, wasn’t it amazing?”
2. They believed that observing the night sky resulted in positive feelings, “‘This huge mass of stars in the sky, it makes you feel a lot better … you look up and you look out … it just draws you out, you concentrate on something else.
3. None of the participants expressed being afraid of the dark “My kids, they’ve been brought up here … They’ll go on their bikes ahead of me in pitch darkness”. “When I moved here I had to train myself not to be scared … now I feel 100 percent safe.”
4. Residents see the night sky as part of nature: “The dark sky is integral. It’s what Sark is. It’s part of nature here.”

You can read all about Ada’s research in her book ‘Sark in the Dark: Wellbeing and Community on the Dark Sky Island of Sark’ available on Amazon here.
 
But what is it about star gazing and the moon that captivates us so? The BBC’s Linda Geddes, delves into the lunar cycle to see what’s behind the mystery of the moon that’s fascinated us for millennia in her 2019 article ‘The Mood-Altering Power of the Moon’.
 
​​For centuries, people have believed that the Moon affects human behaviour. The word lunacy derives from the Latin lunaticus, meaning “moonstruck”. The Moon affects Earth in a couple of ways:

1. The provision of moonlight
   1. A full Moon arrives around every 29.5 days, and a new Moon follows 14.8 days after that.
2. The Moon’s gravitational pull
   1. Creates the ocean tides that rise and fall every 12.4 hours. The height of those tides also follows roughly two-week cycles
      1. 14.8 day “spring-neap cycle”, which is driven by the combined pull of the Moon and Sun
      2. 13.7-day “declination cycle”, which is driven by the Moon’s position relative to Earth’s equator.

Both the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder believed that madness and epilepsy were caused by the Moon. But scientific evidence to suggest the lunar cycle affects human behaviour was inconsistent.
 
However, in 2017, Thomas Wehr, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda,  published a paper describing 17 patients with rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, who showed an uncanny regularity in their episodes of illness.  “The thing that struck me about these cycles was that they seemed uncannily precise in a way that one would not necessarily expect of a biological process… It led me to wonder if there was some kind of external influence that was operating on these cycles.”
 
Wehr was thorough in his study of his bipolar patients, in some cases tracking the dates of their mood episodes over the course of years. He discovered that his patients' mood fluctuations appeared to synchronise with the moons' (roughly) two-week cycles. It was noted that rhythms were  interrupted by ‘supermoons’ when the orbit brings the moon particularly close to the Earth.

Another possibility is that patients are responding to the Moon's gravitational pullin the same way the oceans do: through tidal forces. "Humans are made out of water, but the pull is so weak that is would be difficult to see how that would work from a physical point of view" says Bambos Kyriacou, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Leicester, UK. "These are incredibly small changes, which can only be detected with extremely sensitive devices, but now there are over 200 publications to support this," says Joachim Fisahn, a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany. 
 
So it's clear the debate continues! To read Linda’s article in full, click here.
 
I for one love star gazing and the wonders of the moon. Absorbing the summer evenings as the sun sets and the fragrance of jasmine and honeysuckle drift on the breeze is heaven. As the skies darken and a tapestry of stars light the sky I feel the enormity of the universe and how we are part of it.
 
And don’t forget this year’s Perseid meteor shower which is active between 17 July and 24 August. This year the peak falls on the night of the 12th and before dawn on 13 August. Make sure to head out at dusk, allow 15 mins for your eyes to adjust, get comfy and enjoy the show.
 
Wishing you a lovely August.
Lots of love, Zoë xx
 
Source: darksky.org | bbc.com | Photo Credit: Greg Rakozy @unsplash