Utah man crusades for starry skies
Astronomy buff sells fixtures that help fight light pollution
That's exactly what happened to Anthony Arrigo in the middle 1990s. But in his case, inspiration didn't flash across his awareness like a meteor. It came in the form of an actual meteor.
A recent transplant to Utah, having moved from beneath the light-polluted skies of Long Island, N.Y., Arrigo was enjoying a dark, clear night in the Uinta Mountains. He and his friend Don Brown had hiked onto King's Peak, Utah's highest mountain, and were wrapped in their sleeping bags and talking.
"While we were sitting out there I saw in the distance a flaming — just a fireball meteor, shooting across the sky," Arrigo remembered. It blazed for eight or 10 seconds, and in that time, he was hooked on astronomy. "I got a telescope, and a bigger one, and a bigger one," he said.
Today, the software developer is the owner of several impressive 'scopes, including a 25-inch-diameter Dobsonian reflector and a 6-inch Astro-Physics refractor, which is one of amateur astronomy's premier telescopes. The Astro-Physics instrument had a seven-year waiting list.
Arrigo and Brown tried to launch a legislative resolution that would have expressed appreciation for dark skies, but that 2003 effort didn't get far.
More successful is Arrigo's side business, Starry Night Lights, which offers a variety of outdoor lighting fixtures designed to lessen light pollution affecting the night sky.
"One of the issues with protecting the night sky is it's difficult to find these fixtures," he said during an interview at his home near Park City. He showed a display board mounted with a variety of fixtures, which he takes with him when he makes pitches about better lighting.
Some have brass or copper finish, others are made to look weathered, some are flat and some are curved, and all direct the light downward.
Proper fixtures don't send light into the air above, or even horizontally. Instead of shining light into a neighbor's home, they illuminate the area below the fixture.
"It puts the light on the roadway," or the deck, or driveway, he said.
"I have 300-plus models," Arrigo noted. "This is a way to protect astronomy."
Consider the Milky Way.
This is the gauzy band of light stretching across the night sky. The center of our galaxy, it's especially prominent during the summer. Studded with bright stars, fuzzy nebulas and dark pockets of interstellar gas, its pervasive glow comes from millions of stars so distant that they cannot be seen individually.
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