There’s a star land waiting in the sky...
New Zealand blazes a trail when it comes to tourism innovation. Now, some are looking upwards for new frontiers. Naomi Arnold explores why we need the night.
Two years ago, I went to Aotea/ Great Barrier Island to find the night. The island had just been named the world’s third Dark Sky Sanctuary, and the first island sanctuary (an honour it now shares with Rakiura/Stewart Island). Although Auckland, 80km away, is just over the horizon, the light pollution that spills from our largest city doesn’t make it as far as the waters of Tryphena Bay.
On a map showing the reach of the light – Auckland’s lamps, headlights, streetlights, and the glow of city buildings – the halo stops offshore, leaving the Gulf’s sentinel island in quiet blackness. Barrier residents are living under something that, internationally, is extremely rare: a natural nightscape.
I was tagging along with a group of New Zealand night sky photographers on a trip organised by Great Barrier’s Orama Oasis, a Christian community that offers spiritual and secular retreats and accommodation. I was in the middle of writing my book on the story of New Zealand astronomy, Southern
Nights. A few weeks later, I returned under my own steam for more research, keen to soak up the skies in one of the darkest places on the planet.
Establishing official dark sky areas has become a thing lately, with residents of naturally dark areas of New Zealand sniffing out astrotourism opportunities and working to establish their dark sky status. The International Dark Sky Association runs the IDA Dark Sky Places conservation programme, with different designations recognising urban dark sky efforts: Dark Sky Communities, Parks, Reserves and Sanctuaries – the highest honour possible. Just 10 places in the world have achieved this, and two are in New Zealand: Great Barrier and Stewart Islands.
Getting, and then maintaining an IDA designation requires a stringent set of guidelines, including restricted and shielded outdoor and council lighting. Currently, along with Barrier and Stewart Islands, the only other certified place in New Zealand is Aoraki Mackenzie, an IDA International Dark Sky Reserve. Tekapo has had lighting ordinances in place since 1981, protecting the viewing at the nearby University of Canterbury Mt John Observatory.
But other settlements are investigating the idea. Martinborough wants to create the world’s largest International Dark Sky Reserve, and is well on its way: it has already achieved an IDA ‘‘3K City’’ classification, which means it has shielded LED outdoor lighting with a colour temperature of 3000 Kelvins or less (this reduces sky glow and effects on human melatonin production; the IDA says 3000K and less LED lights are the ‘‘safest LED currently available’’).
The Martinborough Dark Sky Society was recently awarded Provincial Growth Fund money, enabling it to develop an economic plan for its reserve. It also has a directory of local businesses that are ‘‘dark sky friendly’’. North Hokianga, Southland and Dunedin are some of the other places that have been investigating dark skies projects in the past few years, with Dunedin pledging to replace all its street lights with 3000K LEDs this year, thanks to the Dunedin Dark Skies Group.
The three-day New Zealand Starlight Conference in Tekapo this week will be looking at how to spread this idea throughout the country. Attended by about
100 people, it will be focused on how to make New Zealand the world’s first Dark Sky Nation, and speakers include experts from various fields – astronomy, star-gazing, tourism, environment, health and lighting engineers – who will talk about the impact of light pollution on our night sky and how to reduce it, so we can enjoy dark skies for human and animal health, as well as a host of scientific, spiritual, educational, cultural, heritage, and aesthetic reasons.
Also financial – a Dark Sky status brings tourists, particularly those from the northern hemisphere, many of whom will have never seen the Milky Way. This year, Tekapo opened its new Dark Sky Project, a venture half-owned by Nga¯ i Tahu, which connects Ma¯ ori astronomical storytelling with standard astrotourism. Forty thousand visitors a year visit the attraction, and for the year to May 2019, tourism contributed
$298 million to the Mackenzie District
The night is now rare enough around the world to be a sight worth travelling for.
economy. Other places around New Zealand will be looking for their own slice of that, too, particularly because astrotourism is best in winter – when there’s a longer dark, and a better view of the Milky Way.
But beyond dollars, you really don’t realise what you’ve been missing until you stand under a truly dark, natural sky. When our group flew into Great Barrier’s Claris Airport in a plane like a paper dart, it soon became obvious that stars were becoming all the rage on the island; the plane company, Fly My Sky, had added a word to its logo, becoming Fly My Dark Sky. The airport was papered with nightscapes, a new book about the island’s sanctuary status was for sale, and the stars were a frequent topic of conversation.
With just 700 people, our host Rodger Jack told us as we drove around the island, there was never a particularly viable economy on Great Barrier once its land had been plundered of its timber, the rocks of their metals, the seas of their flesh. But now, there are the stars, and new tourism opportunities have cropped up. The night is now rare enough around the world to be a sight worth travelling for.
The sky has always been dark above the island, as close and familiar as the ocean itself. It is a perfect place for a star sanctuary, because when it comes to reducing light pollution, residents are doing what they’ve always done. With no mains power on the island, they’re naturally thrifty with energy and light, making their own power from the sun, wind, or diesel generators. And the skies will stay dark; the group behind the Dark Sky designation effort have a letter from Vector assuring the International Dark Sky Association that the power company will never put a cable across the Hauraki Gulf and turn on the lights of Barrier permanently.
The Barrier Dark Sky group was first made up of amateur astronomers Gendie and Richard Somerville-Ryan and astronomers Nalayini and Gareth Davies. Back in 2016 when the idea was mooted, it wasn’t new – it had been talked about for some time – but the group put together the background information and urged the council to take up the plan.
It picked up momentum during a 2016 panel discussion at the annual No Barriers festival, called Is There Life Out There? The panel included the Pope’s astronomer, Brother Guy Consolmagno, and Dr Faith Vilas, of the United States Planetary Science Institute. Over dinner, Consolmagno told the Somerville-Ryans how rare their nightly light show was for the rest of the people on Earth.
‘‘You have to do something,’’ Gendie Somerville-Ryan recalled him saying when I spoke to her in the dining hall of Orama Oasis. ‘‘He said, ‘You have no idea what you’re looking at – you better get your act together.’’’
The idea of a Dark Sky Sanctuary got a ringing endorsement from the crowd at the panel discussion, and in just a few months the group had applied to the International Dark Sky Association for sanctuary status, with a document outlining how it wanted to protect the island’s skies for residents and visitors.
They were supported by a continued tide of goodwill. Ninety audience members at that talk signed up on the spot to become part of an amateur astronomy group, and two dozen undertook Dark Sky Ambassador training.
‘‘You can’t do that unless you have the community with you,’’ Gendie SomervilleRyan said. ‘‘People are really proud of their island and have so much passion for a lot of things, including conservation and protection of place.’’
At Barrier, the island is dark. Very dark. When Richard Somerville-Ryan and Nalayini Davies went out to test the light pollution at various spots around the island they found only about five places that were outside the readings that qualified it for sanctuary status, and the people who owned the problematic lights were more than happy to fix them.
It needed to be done immediately, before things got too light. With islanders being quick adopters of new technologies, once brighter outdoor lights were installed, it would be harder to wind the clock back.
New businesses have sprung up, with existing tourism offerings including dark sky packages. Stargazing company Good Heavens formed when Deborah Kilgallon and Hilde Hoven bought an 8-inch Dobsonian telescope, a laser pointer, and beanbags. They taught themselves about the night sky, and the company now takes night tours. They visit groups at their accommodation or a nearby beach, setting up the telescope, sweeping the heavens with their laser pointers, offering hot drinks. Iwi on the island have incorporated dark sky offerings into their tourism packages as well.
On that first trip to Barrier, as well as checking out local night sky photography haunts, we also sailed to Mahuki, or Anvil Island, to photograph the gannet colony and watch the night falling on the Hauraki Gulf. The land owners, Nga¯ tiwai kauma¯ tua Opo Nga¯ waka and his wife Elaine,
granted us permission to stay the afternoon and into the evening, and Opo sailed out with us to his home, tucked into a rocky bay.
We settled into the hillside, in the stink of the gannets, to watch the night fall. We sat through civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight, the photographers busy with their lenses and their timelapse devices. Eventually, the gannets settled, and the stars came out, peeping through scudding clouds. Nga¯ waka pointed out the islands, the currents puckering dark blue silk water. There was Rangitoto, 80km away on the horizon. There was the faint glow of Auckland, in all its irrelevance.
Nga¯ waka told me about how he once used the stars to sail home after a night fishing. He approved of the Dark Sky Sanctuary idea – it shouldn’t damage the environment, like some of the island’s past industries. And he was impressed at one of the dark sky meetings he’d attended, where he saw Jupiter through binoculars, seemingly so close he could reach up and grab it. He talked about the tohunga ko¯ ko¯ rangi and tohunga ta¯ tai arorangi and their descendants, who still keep the names and the stories of the stars.
‘‘They were astronomers in their own right.’’
Those who come to Barrier for any length of time often find themselves struck, unprepared for its isolation and the completeness of its night. Some cannot cope with the isolation. Caroline Leys has seen it often. An Anglican minister with ties to Barrier, she believes its liminal position, its place as a grandstand for the glistening firmament, makes it somewhere you have to ask ‘‘the big questions’’.
The immediacy of the landscape, the loss of the automatic crutch of easy power forces introspection. But the depths of the sky also release joy. And they speak to the child within us, the one that was once delighted at discovery.
‘‘We all need that. I’d be quite interested to do a psychological survey of the island over the next five years, and I wonder if watching the stars will change the mood of the people.’’
In much of the United States you can only see the Milky Way in a blackout. It simply doesn’t get dark any more. Some northern hemisphere observatories have been forced to close or move telescopes to Dark Sky sites, as you need pitch-black skies to see faint stars and other objects in universe. Go to downtown Auckland at night and see how many stars you can count. New Zealand isn’t as bad as the big cities yet, but in many places the darkest the sky gets is a washed grey.
We need the dark, because too much light at night is bad for us. It not only interferes with human circadian rhythms, leading to health problems and insomnia, but it also negatively influences the patterns of insects and animals. We evolved with a dark sky at night, and we continue to need it, despite the advances of modern power generation, of bright days that continue on long after sundown in our homes and on our streets.
‘‘How can you think of the all the big questions of life if you can’t see anything?’’ Gendie Somerville-Ryan says. ‘‘Every time you look through the telescope and see the rings around Saturn, you’re reliving history and philosophy.’’
Although we can walk outside at night without a torch and have the cone photoreceptors in our eyes adapt so we can see better within a few minutes, our extremely light-sensitive rod photoreceptors take longer to fully adapt – up to two hours. So even when we go camping, or tramping, or are lucky enough to live in a place with naturally dark skies, not many of us will ever spent that long outside, lightless, until our eyes are truly dark-adapted. Only then will we really get to see the depths of the Milky Way that our ancestors would have, and perhaps pause for a moment of reflection on what that might mean for our lives.
The brightening of our night has been a silent death. Because how would we notice? We no longer need the stars in our daily lives.
Internationally, the brightening of our night has been a silent death. Because how would we notice? We no longer need the stars in our daily lives. Their use in time-telling, weather-predicting, and the truth-telling and predictive functions we once granted them have long been trounced by science.
Meanwhile, we’re inside, subjecting our eyes to hormone-disrupting blue light. Great Barrier Island is one of the few places on Earth where you can experience something we never noticed we lost: a truly prehistoric night sky. And if New Zealand really can become the world’s first Dark Sky Nation, it’s a treasure that will be returned to us all.
Southern Nights by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins, $65) is out now.