Sunday, March 27, 2011

Earth Hour 2011

And so, it was Earth Hour 2011 on Saturday where buildings and businesses were encouraged to turn off lights for an hour to ease electricity consumption - the outcome was an 8.9% decrease of electricity on the powergrid. It was pretty cool to see the Toronto downtown core dimming down for this event despite there were still some offices here and there that was still being lighted. One of the events that was opened for the public during this hour included the U of T telescopes since the light pollution is lower during this period of time.
After my friend and I finished a superb grilled sea-bream for dinner, we headed towards 60 St.George Street of where the telescopes were housed, and found ourselves stumbling inside pitch black rooms filled with huge crowds of people lining up for the event. We saw the Beehive cluster, and Saturn which was pretty cool with its' rings and an orbiting moon clearly visibly in the dark crisp skies. One of the ladies suggested that we were quite lucky to see this since she was here past 3 yrs but was unable to make out the Beehive cluster - guess the goddess of Saturns likes us ;) lol

2 comments:

AJEYA RAO said...

Thats very nice. The only differemce is in India, during summer, we have an hour or more than that power cut daily. :-)

Edmlee said...

Ah, that's interesting to know Ajeya! An hour a day to take some time off to smell the flowers and enjoy the night sky is good :)