Sunday, February 25, 2001; Page B08

The night sky is the world's largest national park with its stark beauty available to anyone who steps outside and looks up.

For 20 years I presented programs for amateur stargazers at locations in and around the metropolitan area. In 1980 I began presenting these programs at Burke Lake Park. In those days you could see the Milky Way on a warm summer evening. However, development forced me to move the programs to Lake Fairfax Park in Reston and then to Sky Meadows State Park near Paris, Va., about 50 miles west of Washington.

Today, if you go to Skyline Drive and look back at Washington from the Old Rag Overlook near Big Meadows on a clear, moonless night, you see the lights of the Virginia suburbs. You also see the dome of light created by the Washington metropolitan area, which blots out about one-third of the dark sky that was once as much a part of the landscape as the mountains themselves.

It amazes me to think that most of us who pay taxes for municipal outdoor lighting have no qualms about spending our money and precious energy resources to illuminate the bellies of high-flying aircraft and migratory birds, but that is exactly what we are doing.

As dire as the situation is, however, it is reversible. The use of properly designed and shielded outdoor lighting fixtures on highways, billboards and businesses can put light where it needs to be: on the ground, not in the sky. In the process, these more efficient light fixtures reap large energy savings that can go back into taxpayers' pockets or into better roads, schools and community centers. These lights provide the same level of security as the more wasteful lights, but by not blotting out the night sky, they also return to us a precious part of our natural world.

Outdoor lighting regulations recently have been enacted in Albemarle, Fauquier and Warren counties in Virginia and are under consideration in Loudoun County. House Joint Resolution 14, creating a task force to study light pollution in Maryland, has been introduced in the Maryland General Assembly by Del. Nancy K. Kopp and 22 co-sponsors.

In 1988 I presented a paper, "The Theft of the Night," to a colloquium of the International Astronomical Union. At that time, an organization called the International Dark-Sky Association was founded. It exists to educate citizens, government officials, lighting designers and others who have an interest in outdoor lighting in methods that can allow outdoor lighting to coexist with the night sky.

It is time that we return the night sky to people so that they can enjoy it as their ancestors did. There is magic up there, and we should do what is necessary to return that magic to our lives.

-- Geoff Chester