Czech IDA section report on 2003 (fwd)

[Jan Hollan <jhollan@amper....muni.cz>]

                  Czech Section report for 2003

  (topical part only, extracted from an e-mail sent to the International
   Dark Sky Association, May 31, 2004. Published in my letter archive
   ``public'' to enable a link to it from newer Reports.)

Legislation

2003 had been marked by continuing attempts to get a tolerable Statutory
Order on the LP issued by the Czech government, according to the demand of
the Czech Clean Air Act. The attempts failed and the government decided
that the Act should be changed as regards LP.

Ministry of Environment acted without our participation, neglecting all
advice from us or from Bob Gent, influenced just by the lighting people.
The governmental proposal how the Act should be changed, had been very
poor, and we tried to change it by means of a member-of-parliament
proposal (submitted by the former env. minister, Milos Kuzvart). Our
proposal had been supported by several key experts at this field, notably
by Fabio Falchi. There had been no official support by IDA, in spite of my
wish to get it.

Lacking the support of the current env. minister (I hoped till the last
moment he will come on our side) we did not succeed.  So, the present
wording of the Act contains just a bit queer definition of LP (but still a
usable one) and an empowering of municipalities to ban any skybeamers. Not
much, but we are still a country where light is somehow mentioned as a
pollutant of the air.

A bit broader overview is contained within an updated text of my lecture
at Muskoka, http://amper.ped.muni.cz/light/lectures/03fall.pdf.

Our proposal of a minimum set of rules to be contained in any legislation
(e.g., at the EU level) is accessible as links 4-6 from
http://svetlo.astro.cz/darksky/. We believe it could and should be
accepted by IDA as a whole. It's something different from the IDA Model
Lighting Code -- it is meant as a part of basic environmental legislation,
fully appreciating the fact that light is a pollutant not very different
from another pollutants. As a serious pollutant, it should be handled not
just on a level of Codes. It should be included also in the US Clean Air
Act in future.

We will try further to include it into the Czech analogy of this Act. We
are convinced this is the right way. These or very similar rules should
become a law, as they are in Lombardy, Marche and Emilia-Romagna
(Italian regions) already. The experience with them is excellent.


Research

In the autumn I've got a grant by the env. ministry for a research of LP
in Czechia. The time-span was just five weeks, but we with the team
based at the Masaryk University in Brno we got a lot of interesting
results. Then put them together in a final report. The report and all data
submitted to the env. ministry are publicly available as well, within the
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/noc directory (noc=night in Czech). It's in Czech
only, including the examples in the subdirectories, bits of English info
are in http://amper.ped.muni.cz/noc/english/. Another result is contained
within
         Re: light trespass threshold
        URL: http://amper.ped.muni.cz/darksky/a/msg00064.html
 (full moon light definitely disturbs a significant part of population as
regards sleep, so 0.2 lx of artificial light at night at the outer pane of
the window in bedroom is definitely a nuisance).

One of the main outputs is a software (under a GNU public license) which
enables accurate luminance digital photometry by ordinary CCD cameras
 (a user-unfriendly directory with all the stuff is
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/light/luminance/, at this moment it may perhaps
serve to another scientists interested in the issue). Thanks to that, it's
easier for qualified people to record and report luminance values than to
measure and record illuminances.

with best regards,

 Jenik Hollan