The Belgian Platform Light Pollution and the International Darksky Association (IDA) Europe welcome you to the website of the Fifth European Symposium for the Protection of the Night Sky, to be held on April 29th and 30th, 2005, in Genk, Belgium. Here you will find all information concerning this event.
This website will be updated regulary with new information of the symposium.
Deadlines
Please consider the following deadlines:
February 1st 2005: Presentation/exhibition registration deadline
February 15th 2005: Standard Registration Deadline
March 15th 2005: Deadline for Withdrawal with full refund
April 1st 2005: Advance payment deadline
5th European Symposium, April 29th – 30th 2005, Europlanetarium Genk, Belgium.
The European Symposium for the Protection of the Night Sky is a yearly event of IDA Europe. It is a meeting on the topic of light pollution, of associations trying to reduce light pollution in Europe, scientists, lighting engineers and governments. The 5th edition will be held on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th of April 2005 in the Europlanetarium in Genk, Belgium.
A 5th edition is a good reason for a special edition. As the organising association ‘Platform Lichthinder’ also holds her tenth ‘Night of Darkness’ on March 19th 2005, the members of Platform Lichthinder are even more encouraged to make this edition a memorable one.
For these reasons, the organisation is working out an extremely strong programme with a lot of attention on new lighting technologies reducing light pollution, results of scientific studies about the effects of light pollution on human health and the environment, and successfull projects which are real examples that lighting can be used without light pollution in Europe. For the best lighting project there is the IDA Europe Outdoor Lighting Award.
The Night of Darkness is a symbolic action and aims to raise awareness amongst the public, companies and governments about light pollution. The past 10 years, this action has known increasing successes. The last edition for example, more than half of the Flemish municipalities participated by switching off a part of their outdoor lighting. This would be achievend by switching off monument lighting, swiching off 1 on 2 lamps during the whole night, switching off light in a region were an activity takes place, or like the city of Merelbeke did, switching of all public lighting on their territory.
At the same time, more then 50 public activities were organised all over Flanders. About 15000 visitors participated. The Night of Darkness has inspired governments to start working on the problem of light pollution. To celebrate this tenth edition, the 5th Symposium for the Protection of the Night Sky was brought to Flanders.
