Astronomy has been my passion for a few years now and I knew during freshman year I wanted to do something that would benefit me which is a little selfish in a way but I really wanted to make some sort of effort towards something I deeply care about. I did have some trouble freshman year finding a definitive thing of what I wanted to focus on but once I found out about Light pollution I wasn’t going to stop. I ran into some obstacles too, I had some teachers telling me that it wasn’t an issue and that I should choose something else but I didn’t want to do that. After my presentation he was impressed and he told me that he learned a lot about light pollution and now realizes that it’s a problem. At the time I didn’t really care about the important part of this, I was happy to be able to show him up but I realized that this was really important data. He didn’t believe it was a problem and that’s why light pollution is an issue, people just don’t know. Going back a little to my presentation, I knew that telling people that light pollution affects astronomers and the night sky wouldn’t do anything to sway their opinion. I’d probably say one percent of my class cares about that stuff so I started researching about the different aspects light pollution affected and there were lots. I touched up on each of these different aspects very slightly, it was a way to induce guilt or just bring awareness that it isn’t just an issue star lovers are affected by. Sophomore year came by quickly and I had an idea how I could make this STF work better than last year. I was planning on coming together with someone and working together as a group as that would expel some of the workload but I ended up finding four other people. I first told Emil about the idea and he instantly joined me and I was ready to begin. I met up with Michael and jokingly asked him if he wanted to join. I started explaining how we would be a superpower if we came together. He was really hesitant about it so I just walked away and decided to invite Aries since for some reason I wanted a trio now. I gave her an explanation why she should join besides the fact me and Emil were a team and she joined too. Michael also joined around that time and Eduardo came last. I needed another person for the final aspect of my STF. I convinced each person with an aspect I knew they would like to talk about and how they already had some sort of background knowledge.
Research came easy to me as I already had a full year worth of knowledge but I started relying too much on that past knowledge. Instead of researching my specific aspect I was just moving around helping each of my teammates trying to give them a brief explanation of light pollution. After some time I finally realized what I wanted to do one the economic side of light pollution. I wrote an article on how personally, country, and the world is affected by it. I decided to write a compare and contrast article for my second article since Emil covered another part of the economic side. I sped up closer to the end of the quarter and finished everything with ease since this idea isn’t new to me in any way. What I did differently this year compared to last year was how I decided to start writing first before having my notecards done. The reason I did this was because I had a length understanding of light pollution already so I knew what I wanted to talk about. I used my prongs in my article to begin researching specific harm light pollution causes towards the economy. I told my group I could help them with each of their aspects since I knew about it but I don’t have such in depth knowledge about each aspect so I could only help so much. This made searching easier for me since I knew exactly what I needed to find evidence for but I did learn a little more on the harms light pollution causes on the economy.
I want to quickly want to go over why I wrote my article about air pollution and light pollution. I wrote that article since I wanted to expose how light pollution also affects and pollutant. It's important to know this since air pollution is a well known pollutant and comparing both pollutants just to realize that these pollutants also have a cause and effect relationship supports the idea that light pollution is really negative.
I really appreciate my members for the work they gave towards our STF and I hope we can continue to work with this type of passion we all towards each of our aspects. I believe that we’re going to do well and I hope that we can do something great this year.