TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz asks: How often do you see the true beauty of the night sky? At TEDxPhoenix, she shows how light pollution is ruining the extraordinary — and often ignored — experience of seeing directly into space.
Walkowicz explains the importance of preserving our dark night sky from the perils of light pollution and other lesser-known factors. In Lucianne’s eyes, “Our night sky is a natural resource, it’s like a park you can visit without ever having to travel there. But like any natural resource, if we don’t protect it, if we don’t preserve it and treasure it, it will slip away from us and be gone.”
With numerous citizen science projects online, such as planethunters.org, she encourages would-be astronomers to get involved and contribute to the results of the projects.
Walkowicz works on NASA’s Kepler mission, studying starspots and “the tempestuous tantrums of stellar flares.”
