A few days back we wrote about the Perseid meteor outburst taking place between August 11th and 12th and I sincerely hope you had the opportunity to find a remote location with low night pollution to see it because it was truly a cosmic phenomenon (we lay some futon cushions on the back of a pick-up truck, drove out to an area of Gallon Jug fields at three in the morning, and laid back to gaze at the meteor shower).

A couple thousand miles away, residents of towns in the Wet Mountain Valley of southern Colorado, Silver Cliff and Westcliffe, were able to enjoy the display early Friday morning because even from the town’s limits they can see the Milky Way. It is rare to find a town with such low light contamination, but it isn’t a coincidence. Locals have sustained efforts for more than a decade to dial down on the outdoor lighting by not only dimming the light potency but also requiring lights to face downward. These communities are preserving the beauty of gazing out into a star-filled night sky and have benefited from the visitors who started to visit for the purpose of stargazing. Here’s the story as reported by the New York Times:

WESTCLIFFE, Colo. — As people around the world stepped into their backyards or onto rooftops to peer up at the annual spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower early on Friday morning, few of them had a view like Wilson Jarvis and Steve Linderer.

At 2:30 a.m. as the light show was peaking, the two men sat on a grassy bluff here in the Wet Mountain Valley of southern Colorado, swaddled in blankets against the chilly mountain air and looking up at the stars in the torrent of the Milky Way. Every few seconds, a tiny chunk of space ice cast off by Comet Swift-Tuttle would blaze through Earth’s atmosphere, silently streaking through the darkness.

“There’s one!” the men called out.

“And another!”

“I saw that.”

Night skies like this one are disappearing across much of the world, nibbled away by the ever-expanding glow of city lights. American skies are no different. Four out of five Americans live in places where they can no longer see the Milky Way.

But here, the tiny neighboring ranching and railroad towns of Westcliffe (population 568) and Silver Cliff (population 587) have decided to tap into the dwindling natural resource of darkness. The old silver mines that once made Silver Cliff Colorado’s third-largest town are long closed, and many ranchers are retiring. But there is still the night.

So for more than a decade, the two towns and a local dark-sky nonprofit have been dialing down the dimmer switch. They have replaced streetlights and passed rules requiring that outdoor lights point down. The group built a small observatory with star guides who tee up its telescope and take people on a tour of the night. They coax homeowners to hood their porch lamps or dim a bright light outside their house.

“People out of ignorance go with whatever’s cheap or whatever’s brightest,” said Ed Stewart, a board member of the local dark-sky group. “You multiply that by 200, 300, and there goes the sky.”

He said advocates met with homeowners’ associations and held stargazing parties to sell the virtues of the night. When they gaze over the valley and see winking floodlights on a ranch or home in the hills, they see their next targets of persuasion.

In 2012, Mr. Stewart said a new store opened in town that flouted the area’s nighttime sensitivities and became a glowing eyesore. He said people in the community wrote letters to the editor, urging the store’s manager to change the lighting until, finally, the store relented.

“We feel like they’re a part of the community now,” Mr. Stewart said.

Last year, the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit working to stop light pollution, rewarded their efforts by designating the two towns among a handful of dark-sky communities. Lovers of the night cheered — they had put their community on the map by blotting themselves out.

A trickle of amateur stargazers have taken notice and have started to visit, telescopes in tow.

When you drive into either town, the streets are not pitch-black. Streetlights and porch lights glow along the main street, where photos of 40-acre ranches are posted on the front windows of real estate offices. But viewed from the mountain pass above the towns, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff look less like an island of light than a constellation in the dark valley.

Read the full story here.