About

Hello!

Thank you for visiting my blog! I am Qian Hui, a third-year NUS student from the module GE3246: Environmental Pollution. I am a Global Studies major from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, specializing in the theme of Global Health, Environment, and Technology. Living in Singapore, the most light-polluted country in the world, I grew up feeling accustomed to the bright city lights that polluted most of our skies at night. Initially, like most people, light pollution did not really bother me; I even felt that those bright city lights contributed to a vibrant cityscape and gave me a sense of safety!

However, I first started taking notice of light pollution when I began to look up at the pre-dawn sky out of curiosity. It was a chilly morning many years ago, when I was on the school bus, sleepy-eyed, and I saw two bright stars near the moon. It surprised me because I never really noticed stars before. Since that day, I started to look up at the dark sky more frequently. In time to come, I became interested in astronomy and developed a hobby of stargazing. Armed with a phone application that shows you the real-time position of stars in the sky via AR technology, I would scan the sky for stars and record down the names of the stars I observed. On a normal day, I can usually observe 5-10 stars. On a very clear day, I can observe around 20 of them. Stargazing in Singapore can sometimes be a struggle because of the heavily light-polluted sky. With few wide, open spaces to stargaze, stargazing near buildings meant having to raise my arm to block out bright lights so that my eyes could adjust to the dark.

It dawned upon me that living in a light-polluted city my whole life, I have never felt how it was like to live under a sky full of stars every night. A sky full of stars only existed in the stories that my grandparents told me about their youth in the rural countryside. I wonder about how light pollution impacts societies. If light pollution could affect me as a human, could light pollution also affect animals, plants, and entire ecosystems? This blog is the start of my journey in understanding why our skies are always polluted and the far-reaching implications that extend beyond me and my interest in astronomy.

I hope that this blog, even in a small way, can help to raise awareness about light pollution in the world. Thank you for reading!

– Qian Hui