IDA’s Massachusetts Chapter formed in 2018, and in the short time since it’s become one of the most active of the International Dark-Sky Association’s 50+ chapters worldwide. This activism continued during 2020, despite all of the concern and complications brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can read all about the past year’s activities in the IDA-MA 2020 Annual Report, which has been forwarded to IDA’s headquarters in Tucson, Arizona.

The past year’s accomplishments include a virtual but well-attended annual meeting and literally dozens of outreach activities by our members. And of course we continue to promote statewide regulations that, once enacted, will be the first in the U.S. to limit correlated color temperature to no higher than 3000 Kelvins — assuring that the amount of nocturnally harmful blue light is kept in check.

With the new year under way, IDA-MA is looking forward to more growth, more successes, and preserving more stars in our nighttime skies. Our ambitious “to do” list includes:

• passage of statewide lighting legislation
• passage of night-sky-friendly amendments to the statewide energy code
• aggressive engagement of local stakeholders
• coordinated involvement with municipalities to develop outdoor-lighting bylaws and ordinances
• coordination of statewide effort to collect meaningful sky-quality measurements