(inspired music) - When I head out to do some shooting at night, you know, I never know what I'm gonna get.

The last couple of years, and the northern lights have been really hard to come by.

(inspired music continues) But recently we had this awesome display, probably the best display we've had in the last six or seven years.

The lights started early, like 10:00 PM, around then, and they went till at least four in the morning.

It was just all night long.

They were dancing like crazy.

Saw different colors, you saw all these different patterns and formations of structure within the lights.

(inspired music continues) When I come away from a night of shooting and experiencing something like a strong aurora storm, my common practice is to leave an offering of tobacco as a way of just saying thanks to the great spirit for presenting this, you know, for me to witness.

(inspired music continues) (Travis speaking Ojibwemowin) Hello, all my relatives.

(Travis speaking Ojibwemowin) My name is Travis.

I am Bear clan and I am from Grand Portage.

(soft music) Grand Portage is an Indian reservation that makes up the very northeast tip of Minnesota.

We are surrounded by massive water with Lake Superior.

(waves droning) We have the Pigeon River which forms the northern boundary of the reservation.

And we have some of the highest elevations in the state, so there's a lot to see and a lot to photograph here.

(soft music continues) (camera snapping) The quality of our night sky here is just incredible.

You've got nights where it's so dark, there's so little light pollution that, once your eyes adjust, you can actually walk around by the starlight.

With all of the traveling I've done, I don't think I've found a place that has kind of that all-encompassing beauty that this place has.

This is home for me.

(soft music continues) My family's history in this area goes back, I'm sure, a lot farther than I even realize, on my mom's side.

And that family connection, just having a longevity and a place, you know, you kinda feel that through, not just the place, but through your family members as well.

And you know that your people have been here for so long, and that connection comes through to you in ways that you don't even realize sometimes.

(gentle feelgood music) The whole overall process of going out and, you know, spending time under the night sky and capturing these really cool photos of the Milky Way or photos of the northern lights, it is very much a process.

You need to be prepared.

I will scout out locations well ahead of time.

(soft music) When I arrive on location, it'll be before it's dark.

I'll get there an hour or two before the sun goes down, and just sitting in a spot and watching the light change, that's one of the magical things about being anywhere, I think.

You know, you can be in the middle of a city and watch that same thing.

As that moment is arriving, when daytime transitions into nighttime, and the sunlight is going away, and it'll soon be traded with starlight, in those moments, everything else kinda melts away.

I'm there, I'm with the stars, and that's all there is, it's that simple.

When you've got that big, beautiful line that is, you know, that arc through the sky of this milky band of stars and light, the reflections that you get in the water tie the earth and the sky together.

(soft celestial music) You've got this whole cycle of what water does, you know, it evaporates, it goes up into the sky, comes back down as rain.

And by having something so close to you, showing you, right in front of you, what you can also see there in the sky, it just ties it all together.

So, in a way, you feel kinda big, like, wow, I'm part of this big thing, but also I'm so incredibly small at the same time.

When you have that presented before you, how can you not be amazed?

(soft anxious music continues) The city at night, for me, is always kind of a shock to the senses.

So much of Northeastern Minnesota is so wild and remote, and all of a sudden you've got traffic and lights everywhere.

All that movement and energy.

The whole experience brings to mind our relationship with the darkness of night and the impacts of artificial light.

(gentle bright music) Paul Bogart is an author who has thought a lot about that relationship, about the wonders of the night sky and the impacts of artificial lights in our cities and towns.

The research for his book, "The End of Night", took him on an international journey.

- So, for "The End of Night" I had some decisions to make, you know, where was I gonna go, what was I gonna try to see, what are the issues that I was going to investigate?

And one of the first decisions I made was to start with some really bright places and to kind of work my way down to some really dark places.

(upbeat music) So, in the opening of the book, one of the first things I do was go to the Strip of Las Vegas and meet with the head of the Las Vegas Astronomical Society.

(upbeat music continues) So we took his telescopes down to the Las Vegas Strip, and set 'em up in front of the casinos, and went stargazing.

And that was just a great example of not being able to see much of anything, right?

Then, Times Square in New York City was soon after that.

After that, I made a choice to go to London and to Paris.

London, in part, because I really wanted to see gas lamps, gas lighting, which is something that we can't see very many places anymore.

When artificial light first came to the big European cities, it was gas lights, and people don't realize how different that was from what we see now, how much dimmer.

So, I saw that in London, and then of course moved to Paris, and it was a great place to go because they have spent so much time thinking about how they light their city.

They're consciously creating an atmosphere of lighting, of nighttime, that will draw in tourists, it's part of the appeal of the city.

As opposed to how so many things are lit across this country, certainly, which is just blast light at the structure as bright as you can make it.

So, not very creative, not very beautiful.

(soft music) From there, then I started going to some more, I guess, natural locations, some of the natural national parks in this country.

I'll tell you one experience of being out in Death Valley National Park and California.

There were no clouds and it was a perfect night to be out there, and I just have this vivid memory of standing and seeing the stars rise out of the horizon as, you know, this revolving night sky, and fall off the edge of the earth in the west.

Just that sense of, you know, this kind of thing, and, boy, we just never get to see that anymore.

I was lucky I got to have that firsthand experience with real nights, real night sky, real darkness, truly natural, natural night.

We've become a really bright country (chuckles) in terms of artificial light.

And, for example, anything east of the Great Plains is no longer naturally dark.

Eight of 10 kids born in the US today will never live where they can see the Milky Way.

We have taken what was once one of the most common human experiences, which is walking out the door at night and coming face-to-face with the universe, and we've made that one of the most rare of human experiences.

So, there are many costs to light pollution, right?

There are economic costs, there are costs to human health, there are costs to environmental health, but there are also these, what I think of as intangible costs, right?

What do we lose when we no longer have this firsthand experience of coming face-to-face with the universe?

And I think they're vitally important, right?

They impact everything from art, you know, all the young van Goghs out there who aren't being inspired, right?

All the painters, all the writers, all the musicians who are not having that experience of a real night.

They impact our experience of contemplation, of meditation, of thinking about our place in the universe, of thinking about our relationship with the rest of creation.

(determined music) - [Travis] As the experience of pristine dark skies is becoming more rare, it seems like, at the same time, people are noticing that something is missing.

(people chattering) - Oh!

- Oh, shooting star!

- That's pretty cool.

- That was awesome!

- [Travis] Star parties are happening everywhere, and it's exciting to get together with folks who have discovered just how incredible the night sky can be.

In fact, it was at a star party that I first met Bob King, Astro Bob.

- And so, he's dragging, in his hands, two of those constellations.

Scutum, the shield, which exists to this day.

For me, the night sky gives me a lot of joy in a lotta different ways.

It's almost like you get filled up with so much joy, so that when someone who doesn't know a lot about the night sky but who would like to know or learn more, when I had the opportunity to talk with them, it makes me super happy.

And if the person, the little light goes on in their head and they're like, "Oh, I understand how the earth goes now, and why the stars move.

Oh my gosh, of course."

You know, like any teacher, you are overjoyed.

I moved up to Duluth because I love the north, and here in Duluth we're close to dark skies, and you don't have to drive very far to see a lot more.

So I love that access to the night sky, to keep that connection and deepen it.

(soft celestial music) Things that stand out for me are just like seeing Jupiter's moons for the first time.

(soft celestial music continues) There it was, it really was like a little solar system in miniature.

I still have that image, which is crystallized in my brain.

As far as the things that are available to someone without a telescope.

For one, there are eclipses of the moon.

That's a big one.

(soft celestial music continues) The rising of the earth's shadow.

Every evening, clear evening, when the sun goes down in the west, the shadow of the earth, which looks like a dark blue gray curtain, rises in the east.

And just watching that shadow rise, you can see some interesting things happening there.

So that's available to anybody, no equipment needed.

Moon rises, right?

Sunsets.

Seeing the distorted moon on the horizon, caused by the atmosphere.

(soft celestial music continues) There are annual meteor showers.

There's like four or five of these meteor showers that occur every year.

You get to just lay back in a lawn chair on these days and watch these meteors from comets come screaming down and flaming into the atmosphere.

It's wonderful.

With a pair of binoculars, you can look at the texture of the Milky Way, you can see nebulous, you can see the brighter galaxies, you can even see the moons of Jupiter.

(soft celestial music continues) I love getting to know the cosmos, creature by creature, character by character, one by one.

And then, over time, you do get a sense of space, even the three dimensionality of space.

'Cause at first glance, you look up and it looks flat, you know, it's two dimensional, but over time you get to realize that's closer, this is farther.

If you're in the woods, if you take a bunch of different trails, over time you feel like you know those woods, so you begin to anticipate what's around the corner, what's coming up with this season or that season.

With the night sky it's kind of the same thing.

The first thing to get to know are the brightest stars in the sky, and there's just a few dozen of those, not too hard.

And what you're doing is you're making that connection, you're increasing your knowledge of the night sky, and you're beginning to create a map in your mind the way you would when you're walking through the forest.

When I see the star Vega rising late in the winter, Vega is a spring and summer star, I know that when it's rising, the season is going to come.

I have hope that it's going to come.

Vega gives me hope.

This is a human thing to do, this is how we connect with the sky.

You learn it, you make these associations, then it becomes, suddenly becomes a part of your life.

The way birds, flowers, and so many other aspects of nature do.

You learn and absorb, create a map, and then expand that map deeper into space.

(soft celestial music) When we look at the constellations, again, we're looking at patterns that have been handed down to us.

When you buy a book about the constellations, you're going to get the Western version.

And the Western version, it originally came from Babylon, essentially Mesopotamia, it was handed down to the Greeks and Romans, they transformed it some, and then it was further handed down to the Arabic peoples of North Africa and Spain, and then they added their part, so we have a multicultural thing happening.

And there are 88 constellations.

And the big joke among people who learn the constellations for the first time is you show them the Big Dipper and they say, "Well that doesn't look like a bear."

(bear growling) Most of them don't really look like their figure, like their name.

Part of the reason for that is light pollution.

Light pollution has stripped away the fainter stars, so we can't make those curly cues that might define the bear.

We can't see those so easily unless we go to a darker sky.

A lotta people talk about the wilderness, going to the wilderness, you know, take your trip to the wilderness, which is a wonderful thing to do since you can just lay back in a canoe, go to the Boundary Waters, just let that thing float right out in the lake a little bit, lay back and look at the night sky, Just float there weightlessly.

You don't have to know anything, it just inspires you in its pure wonder.

- [Travis] Bob King's enthusiasm for the night sky and the constellations, as understood in the West, is contagious.

But traveling across the globe, through different cultures, reveals even more rich stories and perspectives.

(ethereal music) - I'm Jessica Heim, and I am a cultural astronomer.

My research looks at the intersection of human culture and the night sky, and why the night sky and the stars are important to humans in different cultures, at different time periods across the world.

People tend to think of the constellations.

You know, there's the Greek constellations, so everybody thinks there's a big bear, and Orion the hunter, and Taurus the bull, but every culture on the planet has had a relationship with the sky and they see stars, constellation groups, that are relevant in their area.

The human eye sees patterns, and they'll see patterns that are meaningful in their context.

Like in the Ojibwa culture, a moose makes a lot more sense than an upside down flying horse.

And there are obviously differences, even among, like, the North American continent.

Different tribes will have different teachings about a similar group of stars, but there's also a lot of similarity.

I would say one similarity that pops up all across the world is just this idea of the sky and the earth are connected, the above and the below, they're not separate, it's a participatory relationship, we're a part of that process of this... Like, there's often seen, in some cultures, looking at certain stars, constellations, that's like the doorway to, say, the spirit world, and so the stars play a role between connecting, like, the physical world and the spiritual world as well.

(upbeat ethereal music) It's really fascinating what we can learn from cultures, and perspectives, and different ways of seeing the world that are different from what we think of everyday.

Western science is wonderful, but it's one particular way of engaging with the universe, and there are many others, and I think there's value in all of them.

- [Travis] The indigenous cultures in our region have developed their own understanding of the night sky over thousands of years.

For the Dakota, features of the land surrounding the Mississippi River, and the great river itself, are connected to the night sky.

(gentle tranquil music) - Native people, Dakota people were here before anybody else that's here now.

This is a place that helps us reconnect to our past.

(Maggie speaking in Dakota language) My name is Maggie Lorenz.

I am Dakota and Anishinaabe.

I'm an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa, and I also come from Spirit Lake Dakota Nation.

(gentle tranquil music continues) Wakhan Tipi is one of our most sacred sites here in the Twin Cities urban area.

It is a cave, also known as Carver's Cave, and has been a site of ceremony, and has served as, like a primary point of gathering and really important decision-making for our community.

This place, today, for Dakota people is a place where we can reconnect, I think, to our ancestors and to our history here, that extends thousands of years, that our people have been here.

(gentle tranquil music continues) (Jim speaking in Dakota language,) I speak to you in my Dakota language, the language of my Sissitunwan Dakota father.

I said that I am of the Seven Star Fire nations, the Seven Council Fires.

That's a consolation.

I'm at a place on the earth that connects with those stars in the sky.

- I was born at Imnizaska (speaks Dakota language).

I was born at Saint Paul, near a place called Wakhan Thipi, the cave in which we have the drawings that tell something of our cosmic origins.

So, what I do is in a planetarium.

I was, you know, trained in western science, but always kept our own ways of thinking here, and the two legs have really come together well, in that the word nucleosynthesis, it just means that atoms are made in stars, and we've always said, "We come from the stars and to the stars we will return.

We come from the earth and to the earth we return."

The iron in our blood, the carbon in our body had to come from a sun before this sun, so we're recycled stardust.

Star stuff are us, I like to say.

The Milky Way is like a river, not just any river, but Haha Wakpa, or Wakpa Thanka, Wakpa Haska, the big, long river, the river of the waterfalls.

We find burial mounds near river.

It's very intentional, it's not random.

Our elders, those that have passed on, deserved the highest place, near water, to go back up to the stars, a place of honor by the water that flows.

Chon, Chanwakhan, Wagachan, the sacred tree, sundance tree, the cottonwood tree, is filled with stars.

That tree full of stars connects between sky and earth, along rivers, it likes its feet wet, its roots.

It's a bridge between the river down here, with sparkling lights on it, and the sparkling stars above.

The Wanagi Thachanku, the spirit road, it's the road of spirits that we come from and go back to, and we need to be living in a good way so that we go back to that place where we come from, with integrity, with generosity.

As indigenous people, when we gathered here, other indigenous people also came.

The stories show us.

We even have some of the early photographs of people who were not Dakota, wanting to understand what was in that cave.

Apparently, the message was so significant and universal, because all of us are on the same earth beneath the sun and moon.

There are patterns we needed to know, and apparently they were documented there.

- The petroglyphs, or rock art that depicted the significance of the site, unfortunately was in the entrance to the cave, which was destroyed in the late 1800, early 1900, with the coming of the railroad.

(gentle music) And so, our major project right now is the development of a cultural and environmental interpretive center called Wakhan Tipi Center.

The site also includes the burial mounds at Indian Mound Regional Park and the vicinity around those features.

The interpreter center will then provide that kind of education and cultural knowledge about the significance of the site.

And then, of course, our environmental work to keep the site healthy, and restored, and protected.

(soft music) - [Travis] I've learned over time that Ojibwa culture also has deep understandings and traditions associated with the night sky.

But much of that knowledge has been lost.

Our religious practices, and even our language were suppressed by US government policy.

Rediscovering that knowledge has been really exciting for me, and I have Carl Gawboy, his artwork and his stories to thank for much of what I've learned.

(soft celestial music) - For the Ojibwa the Milky Way as the river of souls, or further west, where there's more pathways over the landscape than there is water routes, they call it the path of souls, where you'd walk it, but in this part of the country it would be the river, and what a beautiful river it is, just brilliant and shining.

(tranquil celestial music) One time, I asked my dad, I said, what's Ojibwa heaven like?

And he said, "It's the greatest place in the world, it's just like here."

And I said, you mean like with winter?

And he said, "Yeah, it's just like here."

I said, and mosquitoes, mosquitoes?

He said, "Yes, it's just like here.

What could be better?"

So I'm thinking it be the Ojibwa who think of heaven as just the greatest place in the world, it's just like here, just like here.

If you lived an evil life though, you disappear into the cosmos and you're gone, there's no after world for you.

When the Ojibwa talked about a person dying and going to the after world, you travel that river souls.

And the Milky Way has a band of beautiful light coming down to the horizon, and then there's another branch of it that forks off and then disappears.

And people who've lived and done evil in their life, took that other branch and would just disappear into the cosmos.

But those that lived a good and proper life, would continue on their journey to the after world, where they came to a land of forests and prairies, full of game, and full of all the ancestors that have died, went on before you, you get reunited with them.

(soft music) - [Travis] Carl's explorations have led him to some special places, where he has found important clues about our relationships to the universe.

(birds chirping) (water trickling) (soft music) - Everywhere you have these great, big cliffs, these vertical cliffs that come down to the water.

There are about 200 sites of pictographs between Northern Minnesota and Hudson's Bay.

And the ones at Hegman Lake are absolutely beautiful, the colors are clear.

There are three, big visual images, and over the years, there have been all kinds of people who wrote about pictographs.

Dallas talked about them as mysterious, something from the past, but we don't know what they are.

(soft celestial music) How do you climb inside the brain of someone who lived 300 years ago?

And I must've gone to that site about a dozen times over the years.

From high school on, all the way till a few years ago.

I made sketches and I took photographs of the site, and I kept working over these images, over and over again, trying to piece them together, but I didn't realize then that I had to think like a scientist and not an artist, and that was a big leap for me.

- [Travis] Yeah?

- And when I did that, that's when things started to go together.

Who are the people that met there and said, "Well, this is what we have to remember, and this is what we have to teach, and this is the way we were gonna remember it, by putting these image on the rocks; the Wintermaker, Great Panther, and a Great Moose figure."

So that we see the images on the rocks, we see the constellation, and then there's this prophecy, the prediction, the story that goes with it.

Traditions that extend all throughout Ojibwa lore, that go with it.

So, rather than just looking at the pictographs themselves as art.

And, you know, I was tempted to do that, 'cause I'm an artist.

Looking at the pictographs and I said, well, this is the work of my ancestors.

It's like being reunited with an old friend.

All this knowledge is there.

You're gonna say the moose isn't important to the Ojibwa culture?

It's central to Ojibwa culture.

- Oh, yes.

- The Wintermaker.

The Wintermaker.

We live six months of winter here in this part of the world, it's very, very important.

So, there's all kinds of stories about either the Great Moose or the Wintermaker.

And the Great Panther, the spirit of the water.

And the spirit of spring, the dangerous part of spring, the floods.

There's a lot there that's still to be interpreted.

(gentle music) - [Travis] But talking a little bit more about the moose in the night sky, it's a fall constellation.

- Right, the great moose pictograph, I identify as a constellation of Pegasus.

The figure is kinda squarish.

Well, moose are kinda square, and that's the great square of Pegasus.

So, Pegasus rises late summer, just as the moose are starting to get a little aggressive.

And then, as the fall goes on, the moose consolation gets higher and higher in the sky.

And so, this is when the moose present themselves to the hunter.

And not only do they present themselves to hunters, but they present themselves to cars, and locomotives, and other things.

They are very aggressive, they don't back away.

Then what happens is that the consolation starts to set, and that's when the moose get weaker.

As the winter goes on and as spring comes, the moose just suffer from the cold and the scarcity of food, they get weaker and weaker until it finally sets in the west.

And so, the rising and setting of the consolation matches the rising and setting of the moose out there in the forest.

- Fall or autumn is a time for hunting.

And you've talked about a cultural story associated with moose.

Could you share that again?

- Well, it was based on a pictograph of a moose smoking a pipe.

In all the hunting societies, all the Indian hunting societies, there's usually a story just like this, about how humans got permission to harvest animals.

There's no question that Indians revere the animals they hunted, but they still hunted them, they still killed them, and they ate them.

And so, what happens that made this possible, ethically?

You know, the Plains Indian have this about the bison, and the Ojibwa have this about the moose, that there was a obligation, a mutual obligation between moose and humans.

(gentle music) And looking back to a legendary time when, or I should say mythical time, when animals could speak and humans could speak to them.

And there was a moment when animals gave permission to humans.

They would give of themselves to humans, provided humans did certain things.

And one of the things was ceremonies of respect and honor.

- Sure.

- If the Indians stopped doing that, the animals would withhold their gifts.

A other would be their social obligations, to share the food once you got it, to take care of your family, to honor elders.

So, that pictograph of the moose smoking a pipe was the use of tobacco as part of these ceremonies.

(gentle music continues) In the story, a pipe makes its appearance in a moose lodge.

The moose in this story live in a lodge just like people do, and they have different places that they sit in, and sit around the fire, and they converse, and this pipe magically floats through the doorway and goes around the moose population, and that's what's set in motion the use of tobacco as a sacrament to honor the moose, and the moose then agree that they would give of themselves.

- [Travis] Just as Carl has been deepening our appreciation of the night sky, others are working in communities around the world to address the effects of light pollution, which impacts human health and the environment.

Duluth, Minnesota is a good example.

- Well, I was always interested in environmental issues and had a lot of awareness about ecological things ever since I was a little kid, and I wanted to look for an issue that would be not a controversy, but something that people could work together towards.

There's a lot of divisive ideas about how we should interact with the natural world and how we do interact with a natural world.

And so, what I liked about Starry Skies is everybody loves stars, and there's no reason to have light pollution.

- One of the turning points for me was actually visiting with my father, years ago, in Arizona, and at about 9 o'clock at night, I went out on the veranda and looked over the valley, and to my astonishment there were like no big lights at all, it was maybe a couple twinklings here and there.

There are strict dark sky ordinances there.

And I came back and started thinking about it, and thinking, boy, if they can do it there, we should be able to do it here.

- So Randy Larson and I started a chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association, and that's what Starry Skies North is today.

We focus on educating and advocating about light pollution and celebrating the night sky, and this has been important because humans have lit up the night brighter, and brighter, and brighter, and it's not just because we have population increase on the planet, we have the propensity that when technology gets cheaper we use more of it, and, well, we've had an exponential increase in light pollution in the past 10 years.

So, the overuse of light at night not only diminishes the way we connect with the night sky, it affects the environment, it affects other animals, it affects plant pollination, insect activity.

70% of species are nocturnal, they're more active at night.

So, light pollution is stealing the night habitat from these species, it's impacting their survival, and we need these species for our survival.

Light pollution at night has a major impact on our health.

Light at night is a contributing factor to all chronic disease, including obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

So we're all really familiar with the experience of the color of light.

If you go into a really bright room, like a retail space or a dental office, compared to like a candlelit dinner, we all understand that that has different qualities and we have a different experience of that.

Light is measured in what's called Kelvin temperature.

The warmer the light, the lower the number.

And the cooler, or whiter, bluer the light, the higher the number.

So the kind of incandescent light that we've been used to indoors, in the past, is around 2,700.

Daylight's more around five or 6000.

So, light is the main signal for our circadian rhythm, and our circadian rhythm is what tells our body whether it's daytime or nighttime.

So, bright blue white light tells our body that it's daytime.

It's the worst kind of light to be exposed to at night, because this color of light shuts down the production of melatonin.

We need melatonin in order for our bodies to rest and recover.

So, the issues of human health and light at night are so important the American Medical Association has recommended that street lighting be 3000 Kelvin or warmer.

So, this is especially important, because about half of our light pollution is street lighting and another third is parking lot lighting, and a lot of these lights are on when nobody's using them, so this is another opportunity for technology to come in and have lights on only when people are using them, and that'll offer a huge amount of energy savings.

(gentle music) (soft music) - Well, we're sitting on a rock that was, it's called now, Observation Park.

We had a observatory here in the turn of the century.

At the time, there were small, twinkling lights down in the harbor that didn't affect the view of the night sky, and today we've got all kinds of light pollution.

To see any of the stars today is somewhat of a challenge.

So it's trying to bring back what we had, and it's still there, it's just turn the lights off.

- If you look at light pollution maps from 2014, the light pollution dome from Duluth and the Range Cities had already merged, and the light pollution from Minneapolis is coming towards here.

And even from Chicago, is coming up towards the south shore of Lake Superior.

- And I started seeing what was occurring in Duluth, and was really concerned about all of the 4,000K lighting that was being installed in the city of Duluth, and how it was taking away our evening tranquility here, and heard from a lot of people their concerns about the lighting that was being installed, and eventually, became involved with Randy and Cynthia, and started working with them to talk with city officials, to talk to people.

- One of the first things that came up for me was Mesaba Avenue was re-lit, and it seemed incredibly bright.

Like in, people joked about, "Oh, you could do surgery under these lights.

", or they were like, you know, "Prison lighting", or, "Interrogation lighting", and it felt really uncomfortable.

- I saw it personally, and then even talking to some of my friends that lives on Mesaba Avenue, where they had to apply the shades that you use in Alaska for the midnight sun, in order to stop the light, and just seeing that, it just made me want to become active in defining a better lighting program.

- I think when we started there was a huge grant system across the US that was allowing different communities to put in better lights, and what the cities ended up with is what was at hand, and a whole host of communities around the country received a huge sum of money to change out their light bulbs to 4,000K.

What's more acceptable is, and what the city of Duluth finally started to install, was 2,700, and now even warmer lights, down to, like, 1600.

- [Scott] We have had discussions with the engineers and administration here, within the city, and they have been receptive to trying to get onto a path of lower Kelvin lighting.

- We went through a very robust community discussion, and it took place over probably 18 months.

And in that time of 18 months, the conversation changed from 4,000 Kelvin, to 3000, to 2,700, because, even in that 18 months, the information had changed on what cities were doing.

- We've also worked with Essentia, with the new hospital that's coming here, right, they're gonna be using 2,700 Kelvin or less, on all the exterior lighting, which is a really, a great move forward.

- What we're really looking at is... What we have the opportunity now, with lighting technology, is to really aim the lights where we need to have them.

We can turn them on and off when we need them.

We can dim them down when people aren't usually in a space.

- We installed all wildlife friendly on our parking ground, and we've tried to use this as a template for other businesses to follow.

And you will notice the difference, how we've tried to define, even the interior environment, and it's been really well received.

What I would say is it doesn't cost any more money to install wildlife friendly light.

(soft music) - Duluth is right in the epicenter of the huge bird migration pathway.

Once they clear Duluth, they can scatter every which way, but because we get so many of the inland birds, and so many of them are migratory, and so many of them are nocturnal migrants, having all this extra light is going to be harmful.

They navigate by getting up high enough and use the stars.

Now that we're getting brighter and brighter lights, any light that's going up toward the space where they are is going to totally confuse them.

The way we solve it at nighttime is by turning off lights that we aren't using.

- Whoa.

- It's a really important thing that Duluth and Superior can be on the forefront of, is be these urban protected areas that people can access where they are.

- Over there.

- Right there, can you see it?

- Oh wow.

- You should come see it, the moon's here.

- We have this great opportunity to be an example of how you can be a city with very dark sky friendly lighting.

- And here, just north of us, we've got the biggest dark sky park in the world, with the BWCA, the Quetico, and the Voyageurs, the 2.4 million acres of dark sky.

We could be the gateway to this.

The city of Duluth would provide a great environment.

Take a look at the backdrop that Lake Superior could provide for a dark sky environment.

I think it would just be a wonderful amenity for the city of Duluth.

Residents, tourists, and businesses alike would enjoy it.

- [Travis] The effects of light pollution reach into the darkest corners of the continent.

But across the wilderness lands of our northern border region, there are good things happening under the night sky.

(gentle bright music) - Quetico is a wilderness canoer's paradise.

It almost seems like this landscape was made for wilderness canoeing.

(gentle bright music continues) - So, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, we have rivers, you can travel big water on huge lakes, you can travel on small lakes, or as we say, "Puddle jump", there's just a lot of opportunities.

(gentle bright music continues) Voyageurs National Park is truly a park that requires you to access it via the water.

It is what I like to consider an undiscovered gem.

(gentle bright music continues) Northeastern Minnesota and Northwestern Ontario is known as a geotourism destination called the Heart of the Continent.

The largest land management units, or protected units within that Heart of the Continent are Voyaguers National Park, the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, and Quetico Provincial Park of the Ontario Provincial Park system, and those three areas all were certified as dark sky places relatively close to each other.

(gentle bright music continues) - The Boundary Waters was one of the first sanctuaries, worldwide, but definitely the first designated wilderness certification in the Forest Service.

So, we get so many calls now, by a lot of other public lands, asking us about what our protocols are as far as, you know, how we did our proposal, how we do our measurements, how we made it happen.

So that's really great news.

- [Trevor] At Quetico we're grateful for the partnership that we have with our American sister sites, and are proud of what we've accomplished in receiving our dark sky designations together.

- So, in order to retain the certification of sanctuary for the Boundary Waters, every year we have to monitor the night skies.

And we go out and we measure how dark the sky is in very specific locations.

One of the threats that could affect this certification would be if Thunder Bay got much, much, much brighter, bright enough to show up on our light measurements.

Or if Duluth got much brighter.

Or, I don't see this happening, but if gateway communities right along the border got much brighter.

- The gateway communities are primarily resort communities, you know, their visitors are coming here to experience the park.

One of the resources that they definitely like experiencing is the natural night sky.

Gateway communities and the resorts can use that as part of their messaging to new visitors.

And we've actually seen a bump from the time that we were certified to now, of visitors that are coming here specifically to experience the undisturbed dark sky that this area provides.

(bright music) - Such a big piece of being on a back country canoe trip is being able to go to the edge of your campsite at night, look up and appreciate the millions and billions of stars in the sky.

- You see these two stars here?

- [Bob] As part of the Dark Sky Park Certification, you commit to educate the public about natural dark skies.

- You guys see that bright star down there?

That plane's fine right by it.

That star is Altair.

It is in the constellation Aquila.

Now, when you hear all Altair, that's a different language.

Anyone happen to hazard to guess what language that is?

- It sounds like Arabic.

- It is in Arabic.

(gentle music) - [Ann] One of the biggest benefits of this certification of sanctuary for the Bounty Waters is just an awareness, from awareness on how you conduct your own lights inside the Boundary Waters.

Whether it's, you know, maybe not needing a really bright camp lantern, but also awareness to where you live and maybe how the lights in your neighborhood, or the lights on your house, and how that might impact your ability to see the night sky just from your own yard.

(gentle music continues) - [Bob] We're lucky enough to have a great network of protected areas that provide us those opportunities.

We can all escape and find ourselves again in these places that aren't much change from what they were for millennia.

(determined music) - Minnesota is representative of kind of what's happened everywhere, which is that if you look at images from space, you see the Twin Cities as a bright white blob, and then, essentially, it gets a little bit dimmer as you move out.

But Duluth is bright, you know, St.

Cloud is bright.

The nice thing that you also see though, is when you look at Northern Minnesota, you still see levels of relative darkness.

- Drive, at least in our region, 10 miles into the countryside, let's say, 15 miles, on a night when there is no moon, in the summer, so that you can just truly see and appreciate that beautiful, glowing ribbon of the Milky Way.

It's billions of stars within that ribbon, and it gives you a sense of perspective as your place in the galaxy.

How do I fit into this?

(gentle music) - The other part of getting control of our light pollution is having the opportunity for people to walk outside their houses and see the stars.

You don't really have to go anywhere to have that kind of peak experience.

It's great to go to more natural and protected areas an have a peak experience, it's fantastic, but I think it should be something that's accessible to everyone, and we grew up with that heritage, every culture evolved with that heritage, and I think it's really important that when we go outside, we see the universe reflected in our eyes and not just a reflection of humanity in the sky.

(gentle music continues) - I like the peacefulness of being out there at night, keeps me centered, and balanced, and connected to everything around me.

Just being under this glowing sky is something that nothing else compares to.

I think it's important for us to keep that connection to the stars as much as we can, because it is ultimately, it's where we all came from.

(gentle music continues) (soft music) (gentle music) (gentle music continues)