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Utah ready to take its place in astro tourism hierarchy

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

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The Milky Way is partially obscured by heavy smoke, pushed in by the California and Oregon fires as seen on Sunday, Aug. 8, 2019 at Dinosaur National Monument.


On a cloudless night, how much of the sky can you see?


For Utahns and tourists who seek out the state’s designated “dark sky” locations, quite a lot.


“It never ceases to amaze me, when I’m down in Canyonlands or Capitol Reef, when you can see the Milky Way and you really see just the incredible majesty of space and the sky,” said Lindsie Smith, director of the Salt Lake County-operated Clark Planetarium.


All of Utah’s “Mighty 5” national parks, plus 19 other sites around the state, have been recognised by the International Dark-Sky Association as places where human-made light sources are at their minimum. In those places — more than any other state in the union — people can glimpse the night sky as it was seen before industrialisation and urban life obscured the view.


People have become more aware of the dark-sky movement in the past few years, Smith said. That recognition is partly out of concern over the dangers of light pollution — human-made light bleeding into the sky.


Because of light pollution, Smith said, 80 per cent of people in North America cannot see the Milky Way when they look up at night. The glare of artificial light drowns out the natural light of all but a few stars.


Light pollution doesn’t affect all neighbourhoods equally, said Daniel Mendoza, director of the University of Utah’s Dark Skies Studies program, which is offered as a minor by the College of Architecture + Planning’s Department of City & Metropolitan Planning.


“In some of the lower-income areas, there are predominantly blue lights, and brighter lights,” Mendoza said. He points to the difference between the warmer, yellowish streetlights in, for example, Salt Lake City’s wealthy Avenues neighbourhood and the harsher, brighter lights in some areas on the city’s west side, such as Glendale.


Brighter lights, which add more blue light to the spectrum, “affect your circadian rhythm,” Mendoza said. “It actually affects your ability to fall asleep.”


Residents of lower-income neighborhoods tend to be more exposed to the brighter lighting, Mendoza said, because they often are outside more — taking public transit, or walking, or riding bicycles — and not driving cars, whose windows filter out the blue light. Also, he said, people in those neighborhoods are more likely to be working evening or night shifts, so they’re commuting when those streetlights are lit.


Even the smog plays favorites. “The west side of Salt Lake City generally has worse air quality; the inversions are a little bit worse there,” Mendoza said. “Because of that, they have even less of a view of the stars than if you live in, say, Park City or even in the upper Avenues. … These kids are growing up [on the west side] without seeing any of this.”


The recent onslaught of smoke across Utah blown from wildfires in California and Oregon was, oddly enough, more democratic. The smoke, which turned Wasatch Front skies gray by day and orange at sunset, interfered with dark-sky viewing at sites east of the city — such as Rockport State Park in Peoa and Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal.
A view of the Milky Way also is becoming a lure for tourists, which can help the economy of towns near dark-sky locations. “They end up spending a lot of money in the communities in which they are staying,” Smith said.


Helper, in Carbon County, is one of two Utah towns that carry the “dark-sky community” label. Michelle Goldsmith, a member of Helper’s City Council, said the designation has “given us another avenue to bring people to come and visit.”
In the state’s other “dark-sky community,” in Torrey, businesses have found ways to cater to tourists wanting to see the night sky, said Nicky Wright, secretary of the Torrey Dark Sky Committee, a volunteer group that helps promote the Wayne County town’s dark-sky initiatives.


Wright said a recreational vehicle park in Torrey, which is near the entrance to Capitol Reef National Park, has had nine tour groups this season visiting to see the dark skies. Guide companies in the area conduct stargazing tours, complete with a telescope, he said.


Vicki Varela, managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism, said that’s something her agency tries to encourage.
Promoting dark-sky locations, Varela said, is a means of “distributing visitation, getting people off the beaten path, finding unique adventures rather than everybody flooding into the national parks at the same time of day.”


Marlin and Varela cite a 2019 study by two economists that predicted “astro-tourism” would generate some $5.8 billion over the next 10 years from nonlocal tourists on the Colorado Plateau, which encompasses parts of the Four Corners states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.


“That’s enough,” Marlin said, “to make any state agency go, ‘Let’s cater to that crowd.’”


This “astro-tourism,” Marlin said, isn’t the same as the kind practiced decades ago. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Marlin said, the term was coined to refer to the super-rich traveling to remote places to see astronomical wonders. Carly Simon immortalized the trend in her 1972 hit “You’re So Vain,” when she sang, “you flew your Learjet to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.”

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