The Mayor and members of the Ivins City Council will honor the five winners of the Vista School art contest held last month for 6th through 8th grade students at their March 21st City Council meeting. Students were challenged to paint their interpretation of the night sky over Ivins.
1st Place: Juniper McCowan
2nd Place: Faith Olson, Grade 8
3rd Place: Acelin Smith, Grade 8
Merit Award: Orion Hanson, Grade 8
Merit Award: Emmalani Gent, Grade 6
The winning artwork will be on display at City Hall. The meeting starts at 5:30pm and the student recognition will be the first agenda item.
We are excited to announce the creation of an Events Committee. The first meeting was yesterday and committee members are already planning three community outreach activities:
A special event at the Red Mountain Resort Conference Center with featured speaker Marc Deshowitz. Marc will give an informative and eye-opening presentation on dark sky issues.
An information table at the Kayenta Street Painting Festival, April 27th and 28th, with a commissioned chalk painting by professional artist Anat Ronen who will paint her interpretation of the night sky over Ivins.
A star party in Ivins in conjunction with the St. George Astronomy Group, date to be determined.
Committee Members
Lois Andrews, Paul Andrews, Michael Barton, Sharon Barton, Patty Dupre, Frankie Fleming, Sue Gordhammer, Chris Haddad, Kai Reed, Mike Scott.
Join us
Our next meeting will be the week of March 18th and we welcome your involvement. For more information, send us an email from the Contact Us page.
Rob Roush, the developer of the Red Desert subdivision in Ivins, contacted us last month because he was interested in making his development next to Red Mountain as dark sky friendly as possible. He also helped us on our first nighttime outing to measure the color temperature of lights in the City.
Over the past month or so, we exchanged a number of emails and discussed outdoor lighting issues he was dealing with in drafting his CC&Rs. Rob recently filed CC&Rs and sent us a copy. Rob had clearly done a lot of homework.
Red Desert’s CC&Rs are more restrictive than out current outdoor lighting ordinance. And they are more restrictive than the International Dark Sky Association (IDA) requires for communities seeking certification as Dark Sky Communities.
For example, our current ordinance allows the color temperature of outdoor lighting to be has high as 4,000 degrees kelvin. That’s too high and the City has plans to reduce that requirement to 3,000k or lower. IDA requires a maximum of 3,000k. Rob’s CC&Rs requires a range between 2,200k and 3,000k with a target of 2,700k.
Red Mountain as seen in unusual February snow from the Red Desert development site
IDA also requires properties limit the total amount of outdoor lighting. Our existing ordinance doesn’t really address that, it’s a newer concept in outdoor lighting circles. Red Desert’s CC&Rs not only address overall limits, they also set a maximum amount of lumens for each type of outdoor lighting use. And Rob’s CC&Rs are not only more protective about shielding lights than our current ordinance, they are more protective than IDA requires.
Thank you Rob for taking the efforts of our Ivins Night Sky Initiative to heart.
For more information about night sky friendly lighting, projects we are working on, upcoming events, or inquiring about getting involved, Contact Us.
The City of Ivins is trying something interesting with its outdoor lighting that, at least so far, we have not found other cities doing. The City has installed some lighting where the color temperature of the new light source is 3,000 degrees Kelvin.
Okay, that’s not the interesting part, please be patient. Lights with color temperatures below 3,000k are considered “warmer” and friendlier. A lot of older street lighting in the City has color temperatures well below 3,000k. That lighting has less glare, which is not only a safety plus, it is a big help for aging eyes. But lights with color temperatures at 3,000k are still pretty bright and white.
So, to improve the quality of the light, the City is fitting some of these 3,000k light sources with an amber lens. Nothing earth-shattering, just a simple plastic disc with an orange color.
But the amber lens changes the color of light that passes through it. We expect it helps to lower the color temperature of “colder” LEDs, making them friendlier and reducing troublesome glare.
Now that we have an amber lens we can test it with a spectrometer to see just how much of an impact it has on the color temperature of a light. We’ll let you know what we find out.
The Ivins Night Sky Initiative is excited to announce the addition of two new Board members, Sue Gordhammer and Kai Reed. Both have made significant contributions to our community through their involvement in other organizations and they are passionate about our mission.
Mission
To educate and inform on improving, preserving, and protecting the night sky over Ivins Utah and our heritage of dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting, and to serve as a resource for City officials, residents, and businesses.
Kai Reed – Director & Vice President
Kai has been involved with grassroots advocacy in southern Utah since she first moved to Ivins in 1998. She was the Administrative Director of Citizens for Dixie’s Future (now Conserve Southwest Utah), a local citizen’s advocacy group focusing on smart growth and sustainability issues. In 2011 she was one of the founding board members of Friends of Snow Canyon State Park dedicated to protecting and preserving the Park and in 2012 she helped create the Southern Utah Bicycle Alliance which works to make cycling safe and enjoyable for all cycling enthusiasts. She’s now very excited to be working with the Ivins Night Sky Initiative with the goal of achieving the International Dark Sky Community Designation.
Sue Gordhammer – Director & Secretary
Sue
has been a dark sky advocate since her first canyoneering trip in the San
Rafael Swell 20 years ago. The incredible
image of the night sky without any artificial light is still seared in her
mind. Sue is an avid hiker and mountain
biker and enjoys getting out on the trails with family, friends, and her dogs
as often as possible. She made Ivins her
home in 2017. One of the primary reasons
she chose to live in Kayenta is because of how the community embraces dark sky
principals and she wants to ensure that all of Ivins can enjoy the beauty of
the night sky.
… but wait, there’s more
In addition to expanding our Board, we are expanding our team of advisors and volunteers, starting with a meeting on Wednesday March 6th. You are invited. Click here for more information.
If you can’t attend this week’s meeting but you would like to get involved, please let us know using our Contact Us page.
We didn’t do this yet, but we want you to know about it: We plan to hold a meeting at Red Mountain Resort at the end of March or the first week of April for anyone interested in learning more about what the Initiative is doing and planning to do. (Thank you Red Mountain Resort for donating meeting space for us.) It will be an opportunity to ask questions and to volunteer some time and expertise, if you want, on any projects that look interesting to you.
Last night we did our first measurements of the color temperature of outdoor lighting in Ivins with the help of Rob Roush, a developer interested in maximizing dark sky friendly lighting. We used a professional spectrograph borrowed from the International Dark Sky Association. We need to do more of these measurements because getting the color temperature “right” in our ordinance is critical, because it sets the “look” of Ivins in the future.
The Mayor and City Council were impressed by the art created by the five Vista students who received awards in our February contest for their interpretation of the night sky over Ivins. In fact, they were so impressed by the students’ efforts that they asked the students to showcase their art at City Hall on March 21st and receive formal recognition from the City Council.
We met with the Mayor to discuss all of our current and planned activities, and to create a schedule for preparing a draft ordinance and research plan for the City Council to consider. We are planning a work meeting in early March with the Mayor, City Manager, Public Works Director, and the Building & Zoning Administrator to finalize the draft ordinance and research plan. Tentatively, we intend to deliver these to the City Council on March 21st.
The Ivins Night Sky Initiative was incorporated as a Utah nonprofit corporation in late February. Then we filed for recognition from the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt entity.
We created draft Bylaws and a Board of Directors to do a better job of moving the Initiative forward professionally. The Bylaws allow for 3 to 9 Board members. The initial Board members are: Patty Dupre, Sue Gordhammer, Kai Reed, and Mike Scott. The first Board meeting is on March 1st.
We completed our survey of City owned street lighting. This gave us enough information to analyze what it would cost the City to meet the requirements to get designated as a Dark Sky Community.
We signed up to have an information table about dark sky friendly outdoor lighting at the Kayenta Street Painting Festival on April 27th and 28th. And to add some excitement, we commissioned professional artist, Anat Ronen, to create a street painting at the Festival showing her interpretation of the night sky over Ivins.
The St. George News gave the winning Vista School art students and their paintings a lot of coverage in Grade-schoolers interpret Ivins night sky through art contest. Here’s one more way the art contest gets the message out about improving, preserving, and protecting our night sky.
We wrapped up our student art contest at Vista School on February 12th with five awards for the best interpretations of the night sky over Ivins. We will use these students’ artwork in our educational outreach materials.
If we didn’t mention something you did to advance the mission of this Initiative, please tell us. And if you would like to get involved in any of these projects or other projects we plan to start working on soon, let us know. And let us know about any ideas you have for other projects.
We need all the help and expertise we can get. Send us an email from the Contact us page.
The color temperature of outdoor lighting has become a big deal in the past few years. LED technology has given us incredible energy efficiency. But more and more we are learning that this benefit comes at a cost: Too much glare, too bright, to much harmful blue wavelength emissions, and more. The old technology these LEDs are replacing, low- and high-pressure sodium lights, don’t have any of those problems.
The current outdoor lighting ordinance in Ivins sets a maximum color temperature of 4,000 degrees kelvin. Our ordinance is very dark sky friendly, and at the time it was implemented in 2007 it was probably a model of dark sky friendliness.
But time moves on. The “gold standard” today is to install lighting with a color temperature no more than 3,000 degrees kelvin. That is the requirement for designation as a Dark Sky Community by the International Dark Sky Association (IDA).
But some argue that 3,000k is still too high. For more information, see articles by Christian Luginbuhl, a retired scientist from the United States Naval Observatory in Flagstaff at the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.
So, last night we went out to measure the color temperature of some outdoor lighting in Ivins. We were accompanied by Rob Roush of Red Earth Development. He is developing the Red Desert subdivision in Ivins next to the Reserve. He contacted us last month because he wants to maximize the dark sky friendliness of his project and has been searching for answers about appropriate color temperatures for his development’s outdoor lighting.
Technological improvements are great, but they can create more work, especially for those who pay attention. Color temperature is something nobody ever had to pay much attention to.
First, a disclaimer. Our outing last night is just a preliminary step. We need to do a lot more research, especially since the results we got raised some questions. But it was eye-opening.
We used a high-end spectrometer, the AsenseTek Lighting Passport. It’s an expensive little device that costs about $2,000. It communicates with an app on your cellphone. We were fortunate to be able to borrow it from IDA.
We measured some of the bollards on the west side of Rocky Vista University on 200 N. The spectrometer reading as under 1,600k for these. We’ll have to doublecheck with the City, but we believe the light source is an LED rated at well over 2000k.
City staff told us they added a “lens” to these lights that seems to lower the color temperature. But that’s still a big difference. It may be caused by the light source bouncing off a bowl shaped dome, and the dome’s color lowering the color temperature. Well, there’s some homework.
The color temperature of one of the city’s cobra lights was 1,851k. The light source in cobras is typically high pressure sodium. But they are slowly being replaced by LEDs.
We measured a number of other lights and got similarly low color temperature readings. Maybe the app we downloaded didn’t like our android phone. So Rob downloaded the app on his iPhone. He got the same readings.
For example, the newer post top lantern lights the City is installing were around 1,800k using both phones. We were expecting higher readings.
Maybe the AsenseTek spectrometer was giving us incorrect readings. That seemed unlikely. It’s an expensive, professional device.
But we were still concerned. Maybe we were measuring incorrectly. We tested that by taking a meter reading right next to the light source and a reading a number of feet away from the light source. We got the same result. That’s how it should be. We are measuring the color temperature of the light, not the amount of light, or illumination.
So we continued. The Veterans Center has parking lot lights that read just over 1,700k. These appear to be sodium lights. And it looks like a few were fluorescent, which came in at close to 3,000k. These readings made sense.
Similarly, the parking lot lights at Rocky Vista University registered around 4,000k. That also made sense. These are LED lights and our current ordinance allows lighting up to 4,000k. We found other parking lot lighting that had even higher kelvin readings, some close to 5,000k and some even higher. These were probably installations that predated our current ordinance.
Why go to all this effort? If we are going to recommend changes to the city’s outdoor lighting ordinance, we need to understand what lighting in the city might look like in the future.
This was a first step, and it certainly wasn’t a giant leap for Ivinkind, but at least it’s a start. We have some homework to do with IDA, AsenseTek, and the City.
If you have any expertise in lighting issues, we would value your input. Let us know if you are willing to help by emailing us from the Contact us page.
We have commissioned professional artist Anat Ronen to participate in this year’s Kayenta Street Painting Festival April 27th and 28th with a street painting showing her interpretation of the night sky over Ivins.
While Anat’s artwork will draw attention to the beauty and importance of our night sky, we will participate in the Festival with an information table to answer questions about the Initiative and share dark-sky friendly lighting information.
What can you do to help maintain our
beautiful night sky?
Use shielded outdoor fixtures
Install timers and motion-sensors
Use lower rated bulbs
Use “warmer” bulbs – look for 2700k or
lower on packages
Contact us to tell us you support our efforts and/or to volunteer to help improve, preserve, and protect the night sky over Ivins.
Update of original article posted on January 27, 2019
We drove most of the streets of Ivins counting and photographing city-owned street and walkway lighting. This is the first step we need to take to determine how many of the city-owned existing lights meet the requirements of the International Dark Sky Association (IDA). Yes, we know there are other lights we need to analyze, but we have to start somewhere.
We counted 338 city-owned lights. Next, we need to determine if they meet IDAs shielding, lumens, and correlated color requirements (CCTs) for the City to get designated as an International Dark Sky Community.
Here’s a breakdown of what we found:
1 box light
1 of these
34 lantern lights
68 cobra lights
187 bollard lights
9 pole lights – doubles
39 pole lights – singles
Here is where they are:
Here are the streets we covered (highlighted):
We conducted the lighting inventory on the streets highlighted. The other streets are primarily in subdivisions where there are typically no city-owned lights.
