The Right Light Roadshow

This is a great practical and informative session which precedes the evening event Cities Under Stars: Tackling light pollution in cities which follows from 6:30-9:00pm.

The Right Light Roadshow will be delivered by responsible lighting and dark sky experts Mike Hawkin and Richard Darn.

This event is open to all. Perhaps you are University staff or student and want to become more aware of responsible lighting on campus, or you are a business looking to improve your lighting. Members of the public also very welcome to attend.

Biographies

Mike Hawtin, Head of Nature Recovery Projects and Dark Skies Lead at North York Moors National Park.

Mike’s is Head of Nature Recovery Projects, delivering landscape-scale interventions within the Conservation and Climate Change Department at the North York Moors National Park, a protected upland landscape in the north of England.

As lead Dark Skies officer, Mike led the application for North York Moors to be designated an International Dark Sky Reserve from inception and leads a programme across the National Park to tackle light pollution through education, engagement and delivering lighting improvement projects.

He has contributed to discussions on forming UK Government policy on lighting through his participation in a UK Dark Skies Partnership of protected landscapes and is coordinating the formalisation of the Northern England Dark Skies Alliance to create a greater regional voice for the protection of dark skies.

Richard Darn, Dark Skies Consultant, Astronomer, Activist

Richard sat on the working group that led to the designation of the Northumberland International Dark Sky Park and helped launch the Kielder Observatory.

He also co-founded the Kielder Forest Star Camp, ran a high-profile astro tourism training project for the Animating Dark Skies Partnership called Star Tips and began outreach astronomy in Kielder Forest in 1998.

He continues to work with Northumberland Dark Sky Park and also the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors national parks, being part of the team that gained international dark sky reserve status for both in 2020.

He works with tourism businesses and has appeared on BBC Sky at Night and Stargazing Live and has numerous TV and radio appearances to his credit.

Aside from his dark sky work, he is an award-winning media consultant who has worked for a wide range of high-profile national clients.

Background

The accelerated growth of light pollution has degraded the night sky and harms human health, wildlife and ecological systems (Foott, 2022).

In the United States of America and Europe, 90% of citizens live under light-polluted skies, with only 1% of this light considered useful (Foott, 2022). Although there has been a growing global movement to “protect the night” from light pollution and the importance of dark-sky conservation has proliferated (DarkSky International, 2024), our knowledge about the effectiveness of these interventions is limited.

There is a lack of social, environmental, and cultural understanding about the impact of light pollution and dark-sky conservation, with little attention paid to touristic perceptions of dark-sky reserves.

However, raising awareness through tourism engagement programmes is crucial in addressing light pollution, the loss of our dark-sky and its impact on protected dark-sky places. In the United Kingdom (UK), several internationally recognised protected Dark-Sky places exist where the night sky is unobstructed by light pollution. The North York Moors National Park (NYMNP) is one such place.

The NYMNP has established a dark-sky public engagement and regenerative tourism programme to facilitate tourism stakeholder awareness and engagement in dark-sky conservation and environmental protection and through pivoting research undertaken in 2024 we are now looking at how this could help York become Dark Sky Friendly.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher York St John University