MONDAY 9 JUNE 2003

PROFESSOR PAUL MURDIN, DR HELEN WALKER, MR GUY HURST, MR BOB MIZON AND DR CHRIS BADDILEY

  Q20  Mr Harris: By what factor is the astronomical body in the country expanded by adding in amateurs? Is it two amateurs to a professional? What kind of ratio in your experience?

  Professor Murdin: Guy mentioned a figure of 200 or 300 for his own very serious amateur astronomers over a period of time, that is roughly equal to the number of tenured academics in astronomy in the UK. He mentioned a number of several thousand who would perhaps be observing once a week, that would be the whole astronomy population in the UK that makes a living from it, including PhD students.

  Mr Mizon: If I can add to that. I was a lone amateur astronomer not affiliated to any group for 20 years before I joined the British Astronomical Association, which has, what, 3,000-plus members.

  Mr Hurst: 3,000, yes.

  Mr Mizon: So there are many people who do not count themselves as members of astronomical groups. I think we are just the tip of the iceberg.

  Professor Murdin: If you are looking at people who are influenced by a first-hand experience of astronomy, you are probably talking tens of millions.

  Q21  Mr Key: Following the excellent briefing we had at the Royal Observatory last week, I think the Committee has settled on a list of major offenders of light pollution. One could start with street lighting, motorways, rural roundabouts, floodlighting of churches, sports stadia, domestic security lighting. Have I left anything off that list, and can you prioritise it between you?

  Mr Mizon: Golf driving ranges.

  Dr Baddiley: That is the one frame I unfortunately skipped, it was there.

  Q22  Chairman: Is that in the south of England or north of England or all over the country?

  Mr Mizon: I recently travelled from Bournemouth International Airport to Glasgow by plane, I hasten to add, and all the way below me I could see the little orange rectangles with the little line of lights at each end. If they are visible from an aircraft I am sure they are not tremendously well lit.

  Q23  Mr Key: Under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 local authorities do have statutory powers to declare a statutory nuisance and to serve an abatement notice. Between you have you ever heard of a planning authority doing that in respect of light pollution?

  Mr Mizon: It happens very, very seldom, I would say. There are people who have had action taken by the local councils but the majority of the correspondence I receive as Co-ordinator of the Campaign for Dark Skies is from people who quite simply say that their councils say they cannot do anything or they will not do anything.

  Q24  Mr Key: It sounds as if it is "will not" rather than "cannot" in this case. Is it true also that under planning policy guidance notes those who erect, for example, lighting at sports stadia have to include an assessment of the visual impact of the towers on which the lighting rests during daytime but no consideration of the lighting effect at night?

  Mr Mizon: Yes, the word "appearance", I am afraid, is used only for daytime appearance.

  Q25  Mr Key: So would you welcome new statutory powers for local authorities in respect of light pollution?

  Mr Mizon: Most certainly.

  Mr Hurst: Security lighting from an observer's point of view is probably the worst peril of all because you need a certain amount of dark adaption to enable you to gain what you can out of the sky and a sudden switching on of a light ruins that for another half an hour.

  Q26  Dr Turner: Just to pin this question while we are on this topic. I do not know who, if anyone, is in a place to answer this question but are you aware of whether anybody has done a study of lighting in terms of energy conservation, because clearly there is a massive amount of energy being wasted at the moment and energy conservation is becoming quite important on the political agenda. If it could be demonstrated that you could save seven million tonnes of CO₂ if you re-organised lighting so that you were only lighting the ground and not the sky, and also save a considerable amount of money for council taxpayers, this could be quite a powerful weapon. Does anyone have any information on that?

  Dr Baddiley: I have done some calculations and I did check them this weekend because I thought this might come up, it is an important issue.

  Q27  Chairman: Perhaps you could submit that to us as well.

  Dr Baddiley: I have it written down. In brief, effectively, dealing with light from streetlights only, with 7.5 million streetlights in the UK, the mean power of which is about 100 watts, from that 16% in the traditional type of lamp goes above the horizontal, another 15% is close to horizontal and missing the target completely. If you include all that, the total amount of wasted power is something like 0.33 of a Gigawatt. That is 0.7 of a power station for the UK. You can include other lighting in that, that is just street lights, and the figures go up accordingly.

  Q28  Chairman: Has that been published somewhere?

  Dr Baddiley: It is based on simple calculations. The 7.5 million figure is the ILE quoted figure. The power station consumption is based on PowerGen. There are seven power stations operating in the Midlands, so you divide by seven. They do not work to full capacity and I have allowed for that.

  Q29  Chairman: It would be very useful to have that.

  Professor Murdin: There are studies based on Arizona, for instance, and implementation in their local authorities of good practice for light savings that result for local authorities, and I could provide that.

  Dr Baddiley: In terms of greenhouse waste and CO₂ emissions, seven tonnes of carbon dioxide is created in power stations for every kilowatt year of electricity consumption so a one kilowatt light left on—and that is a powerful light admittedly—for 12 hours a night will result in CO₂ emissions from power stations of 3.5 tonnes. A 100 watt light left on all night every night will be producing 0.35 of a tonne every year. Relating that to all the street lighting I have referred to previously, it amounts to 0.4 of a Megatonne per year of CO₂ emissions[1] that could be saved.

  Q30  Chairman: We have all that in your memorandum. Is there anything you can add to that?

  Dr Baddiley: No.

  Q31  Geraldine Smith: Just to move on to astronomy and education, what contact do the amateur societies, your societies, have with school children and youth groups?

  Dr Baddiley: Quite a lot. I myself, like many of my colleagues in astronomical societies, go up and down the country giving lectures in our spare time. We also are involved in things like National Science Week where there is an encouragement to get school children particularly interested in sciences, and astronomy is an excellent way. Many of these kids have never seen a true dark starry night. Bob goes touring with his planetarium, and quite a number of other people do, trying to introduce them to the concept of what the sky can be like and the awe of magic and wonder of the universe really. I give lectures quite often to the public at all levels. I also run evening classes up to almost university level for the general public, and I do this for free, I do it in my spare time. I am not the only person to do it, there are many others who give up their time because they feel passionately about something.

  Mr Mizon: As a full-time planetarium operator I visit hundreds of schools every year. They are nearly all primary schools because of the way the curriculum is constructed. Teachers tell me over and over again that there are two things in primary science that light up the eyes of little children, they are space and dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are gone, they are extinct; the stars are nearly extinct in some places. You might think that in a rural area the children would have a good night sky. I remember going to Dartmoor where I took my planetarium, and there you might think is a dark sky area with small villages. I said to the children, "I bet you get some good stars around here", and a five-year-old said to me, and I wrote it down, "We have lovely stars but when the vicar switches the lights on, they all go away." That is one of the most moving things I have heard. church floodlights; no stars.

  Q32  Geraldine Smith: You go round with a mobile planetarium, is it necessary for the school children to see the night sky then or can you not give them a similar experience?

  Mr Mizon: Sitting inside a plastic dome with little dots on the ceiling is nothing like sitting below the real night sky.

  Professor Murdin: We would not ask that question for sport, would we. We would not say, "Is it okay for children to watch sport on a Saturday afternoon on the TV and not play it themselves." Education is about experiencing things for yourself, not through somebody else's experience of it.

  Q33  Geraldine Smith: It is not good enough to have planetariums and computers on line, they must see a dark night sky?

  Mr Hurst: I do a lot of teaching and they always want practical observing sessions, whether it is adults or children through to teenagers. Things like showing them the Milky Way and what used to be the most distant thing—the Andromeda Galaxy—you can see with the naked eye without an optical aid, we cannot do any more and they are really quite disappointed at that.

  Professor Murdin: The queues at the University of Cambridge to line up to put their eyeballs to the eyepiece to experience it for themselves rather than watch it projected on the screen is quite extraordinary. People want that first-hand experience. It is that thrill of switching them on.

  Mr Harris: There was an excited queue of MPs last week to get a look at the telescope.

  Q34  Geraldine Smith: What sort of feedback do you get from youth leaders and school teachers in the schools and youth groups you have visited?

  Mr Mizon: I have a stack of thank you letters this high from children, coloured nicely of course, saying: "This is the best day's school I have had for a long time. I wish I could see the stars properly from my garden." It is a very common theme.

  Q35  Geraldine Smith: So the children are very excited?

  Mr Mizon: If we are talking about feedback I suppose the ultimate is when I began teaching at Poole Grammar School 1971 I had a 60-strong Astronomy Society which I founded and several of those children are now professional astro-physicists and astronomers. If you go back to that school now in the year 2003 you will see ten stars from the car park where we used to observe because the local housing estate has proliferated with globe lights and all sorts of badly directed stuff. If those lights were correctly angled there would still be an Astronomy Society at Poole Grammar School.

  Q36  Mr Harris: Of the contact you have with schools, how much of it is in relation to the national curriculum?

  Mr Mizon: The national curriculum states that children will study "the wider universe". Just about everything I do is aimed at the facets of the natural curriculum which children have to know about. Half of it is the earth in space which, of course, is studying our own planet and how it moves around the sun, but they have to know about the solar system and simple constellations like this. If they are not able to look out from their own gardens and see these things there is something very much amiss.

  Q37  Geraldine Smith: Finally, what contact do professional astronomers have with schools? Obviously the amateurs do a great job going round exciting children about the subject but what about professional astronomers?

  Dr Walker: It is exactly the same, I go out regularly to schools. In fact the place where I work is involved in trying to produce an alternative key stage three for the Solar System and Beyond model using the work that we do with planetary probes—like Beagle 2 and SMART-1 and Rosetta of course. The UK is in an excellent position to blow the children's minds with the work we are doing, so you will find that a lot of professional astronomers love going out to schools and to amateur societies. I speak regularly at amateur societies. For us it is a great deal of fun to meet other people who are just as excited as we are and they do go on and take careers in it.

  Chairman: There are five other people who want to ask questions so I am going to have to jump in and curb it a little, not to curb your enthusiasm which comes through.

  Mr Dhanda: The Government has proposed non-legislative measures, the statutory nuisance of light pollution that Robert mentioned earlier. Do you think such non-legislative measures could be enough to sort out the problem? I have confused you. Do you think it has to be legislation? Are there other ways of tackling this without legislation?

  Q38  Chairman: Do you disagree or are you all of the same view?

  Dr Baddiley: I myself believe that the time has come for some legislation. We have tried persuasion, we have tried education. The Government has always been keen that we should educate the public, we have been doing it for 12, 13, 14 years and it is getting worse. The pools of improvement are in a sea that is getting worse, and this will continue. A small example which I think I mentioned the other day in my presentation is that we have managed, fortunately, to get B&Q to promote well-directed, well-designed security lights. It is up to the general public whether they buy them or not. Other chain stores have shown little interest. They have thought about it and done nothing. You can buy ghastly 500 watt security lights in many stores anywhere cheaply and people put them up. You have only got to ask people around are they troubled by neighbours' security lights and they will invariably say yes, and yet they probably do the same thing to the neighbour and this will continue. Without some sort of legislation to control it, it will get worse.

  Mr Mizon: They are the new leylandii.

  Q39  Mr Key: What was the response of Homebase? You mentioned B&Q.

  Dr Baddiley: Homebase said they would look at it when they did their buy for the next year and they would come back to me. The letter is over six months old. They should be well into their buying phase for the winter.

  Mr Key: I think I am right in saying that Homebase is owned by Sainsbury's. I wonder if we had better have a word with the Science Minister!