Light traveled 2.5 million years to reach the shutter of Warren Schmitt’s camera.
Armed with his Celestron Origin telescope, the 78-year-old Gainesville resident and at-large director of the Alachua Astronomy Club has photographed nebulas, galaxies and clusters since 2021, taking up the hobby after retirement.
But the search for true dark skies and favorable forecasts for astrophotography has only gotten harder due to changing atmospheric conditions, ash and dust from wildfires and light pollution.
“This has probably been the worst summer we’ve ever had in Gainesville,” Schmitt said, referring to a lack of good stargazing opportunities. “We’re having a constant flow of moisture across the Gulf of Mexico because of El Niño, and it’s coming right across Florida.”
El Niño is a climate pattern caused by above-average sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean and, along with La Niña, belongs to the overarching climate event called El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
In the El Niño phases of ENSO, warming waters weaken eastern winds, which can disrupt normal weather patterns. Peaking in the winter months, El Niño typically increases the chance for rainfall and severe weather in Florida.
According to a press release from the World Meteorological Organization, this year’s El Niño event is already here and expected to intensify further, lasting through February 2027. Data published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate a 75% chance of a very strong event — when water temperatures rise above around 2° Celsius — for the winter season, when El Niño peaks.
Summer isn’t the best season for astronomy due to longer daytime and twilight hours, hazier skies and higher humidity, but Schmitt usually manages to squeeze in a few dozen nights to park the telescope in his garage.
This summer, he’s only had two.
One was at an Alachua Astronomy Club star party event. Monthly star parties are the club’s gatherings for stargazing and astrophotography, hosted at Chiefland Astronomy Village, Newberry Star Park or Payne’s Prairie State Park.
Cloud cover and rainstorms canceled previous events, Schmitt said.
The Alachua Astronomy Club tracks atmospheric conditions like wind, fog and visibility with their Astronomy Forecast page, which combines three real-time forecasts.
Despite less-than-stellar predictions for the day of the star party, the club got lucky, Schmitt said.
“It’s almost liberating, when you go out there at night and you’re in the dark, just looking up there at the sky,” he said. “You see how large everything is.”
Astronomy at UF
UF manages two main observatories: the Campus Teaching Observatory in Gainesville and the Rosemary Hill Observatory in Levy County.
The teaching observatory provides a learning space for over 800 students a year. Teaching assistants show newcomers how to observe and operate telescopes, take their own astrophotography and analyze data.
Protective domes shield the high-tech telescopes of both observatories, but bad weather still strikes. Last spring, high humidity forced the Rosemary Hill Observatory to cancel one of its Friday night open houses.
When humidity tops 90%, dew can form on the lenses, producing an effect similar to fogged-up glasses, said Triana Almeyda, the director of UF’s observatories.
“The general public got mad at us for canceling, because they’re like, ‘The sky is clear!’” Almeyda said, adding that the observatory let attendants know about the cancellation in advance. “Yes, but if we open [the observatory], it will destroy our equipment.”
If humidity gets into the telescopes’ mirrors, it can cause the growth of mildew or mold. This can blur images or damage the telescopes themselves, requiring expensive replacements.
Random, unpredictable changes in the atmosphere, known as atmospheric turbulence, can also affect telescopes on seemingly clear nights.
Astronomical scintillation, or the “twinkling” of stars made famous by nursery rhymes, appears when varying temperatures and air flow densities distort starlight.
Scintillation can cause stars to appear as if they’re jumping around in images, Almeyda said, lowering the quality of observations.
Next-generation ground-based telescopes, like the Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Paranal Observatory, use sensors paired with flexible mirrors to correct for this distortion, through adaptive optics technology.
Adaptive optics correct blurriness and twinkling in photos to improve image clarity.
However, the short delay between measuring distortions and making up for them creates a “wind-driven halo” effect, a 2020 climate impact study by an international team of astronomy researchers found.
This effect, which is caused by high-speed bands of wind, reduces contrast in images tenfold. Contrast is vital in astrophotography to make stars, and other celestial objects, stand out in photos.
A large fraction of wind-driven halos occurs during strong El Niño events, the study found.
Smoke and mirrors
In addition to more extreme ENSO weather conditions, wildfires intensified by climate change have also affected astronomy. While wildfires are nothing new, the spread of wildfires — like the series that scorched Gainesville this April — are a result of longer and more active fire seasons driven by climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Rising global temperatures contribute to more severe droughts, which often set the stage for wildfires. Currently, the U.S. Drought Monitor reports 17% of Alachua County facing severe drought conditions or worse, while the entirety of the county is affected by at least abnormally dry conditions.
Dust and ash from wildfires can have a long list of health effects. They also majorly decrease visibility by absorbing and scattering light.
Rosemary Hill Observatory was forced to close for multiple nights as Levy County dealt with the Cow Creek fire late April that burned 2,400 acres, Almeyda said. The observatory’s air quality monitoring system measured the amount of dust particles in the air at the time and would not allow its protective dome to open.
Dust particles and ash from wildfires directly decrease the transparency of the atmosphere, but they can also dirty expensive telescope lenses and mirrors, which require special machinery to clean.
Even a few grains of dust can ruin the mirrors of observatory telescopes, she said.
Too bright for the eyes: Linking light pollution to climate change
Light pollution is the elephant in the room of any discussion surrounding modern astronomy.
The National Park Service defines it as excess or "inappropriate" artificial light outdoors, which refers to undirected, wasted light that fails to serve specific lighting needs.
Human-caused light pollution has led to the rapid brightening of the night sky known as skyglow, especially in urban areas.
Measured by naked-eye observations of starmaps, skyglow increased by almost 10% every year between 2011 and 2022, a 2023 light pollution study found.
As of 2016, one-third of humanity couldn’t see the Milky Way at night due to skyglow, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Since then, both the brightening and dimming of the night sky has intensified in the last decade, with a net 16% rise in global artificial light at night between 2014 and 2022, a more recent study found.
The stars seemingly disappearing hadn’t gone unnoticed by Matthew Peters, the president of the Alachua Astronomy Club.
“It was wild, the difference in what I remember as a child being able to see, and what I experience now,” he said. “Dark skies are just harder and harder to get to.”
True darkness and the visibility of celestial bodies is measured using the Bortle Scale, which rates skies on a scale of one to nine. Bortle one skies are the most ideal, giving the clearest view. Bortle nine skies are reserved for major urban centers, like New York City and Las Vegas, where the Milky Way and dim stars completely disappear from the naked eye.
Amid constant new development, the search for Bortle one skies have sent amateur astronomers further and further from big cities.
Twice, Peters has made the 22-hour drive to Kenton, Oklahoma, for the annual Okie-Tex Star Party, a remote camp for die-hard stargazers. He plans to return this October.
“They’re the kind of skies that you dream about,” he said, calling the experience magical. “There’s little to no light pollution, and you see what so much of our ancestors and cultures before saw.”
Most climate models don’t measure the effects of light pollution. Some researchers argue they should.
Light pollution indirectly increases the amount of carbon dioxide that living beings emit without increasing the amount they capture, a 2025 study led by Cranfield University researchers found. This contributes to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, increasing the effect of heat-trapping gases.
Artificial lighting makes up a fifth of global electricity consumption and 6% of carbon emissions, the study stated, and can worsen the effects of bad air quality.
Light pollution is one of the biggest factors impacting astrophotography besides the rising prevalence of bad weather and wildfire smoke, but it also has direct, fast-acting solutions.
An overnight fix
With the flip of a switch, light pollution could be significantly reduced. Although overnight lighting isn’t going anywhere, there are several ways to cut down the amount of wasted light.
UF software developer and Alachua Astronomy Club member Jay Rosen created the Alachua Night Sky Simulator to show the cost benefit of dark sky solutions, saving electricity and night visibility in one fell swoop.
One solution Rosen proposed was changing the physical shape of outdoor lights. Globe streetlights like the ones lining Stadium Road are the worst offenders because they let light scatter overhead. By installing shielding fixtures onto streetlamps, light can be reflected downwards while keeping the area safely well lit.
Another goal of Rosen’s was the regulation of light temperatures, restricting overnight lights to warmer colors. Warmer light has longer wavelengths than cool-toned light, causing it to scatter less.
In May, the Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee voted to formally adopt Rosen’s dark sky principles under Policy 5.3.7 to the conservation and open space section of Alachua County’s 2018-2040 Comprehensive Plan.
Alachua County's plan calls for using lighting at the "appropriate intensity, direction and times” to avoid light pollution and reduce energy use, and it will evaluate current and planned outdoor city lighting against new guidelines.
Rosen's dark sky policies will be a core element in renovating and expanding UF's School of Music, according to UF reporting.
Combating human-caused climate change and light pollution is no easy feat, but new policies are paving the way to darker skies and a brighter future.
