Dark Sky

Stop Calling Space Mirrors ‘Green Energy’. They Are the Death of the Night Sky.

📅 August 15, 2026 📂 Tech Industry

Reflect Orbital’s plan to use giant space mirrors to beam solar power to Earth at night sounds like a climate miracle. But a recent simulation reveals a terrifying downside: the total eradication of natural darkness. We are trading the stars for a few extra megawatts, disrupting ecosystems, astronomy, and human circadian rhythms in the process.

Abstraction Leak Astronomy Climate Change Dark Sky Light Pollution Space Industry

Dark Sky Is Dead. But What One Developer Built From Its Ashes Will Change How You Think About Weather.

📅 July 29, 2026 📂 AI & Machine Learning

When Apple killed Dark Sky, most of us settled for mediocre replacements. One developer didn’t. Strata Weather uses pySTEPS optical flow interpolation, multi-model ensemble averaging, and 14 years of historical data to build a weather tool that treats forecasts as probabilistic reality — not false certainty. It exposes how most weather apps are just wrappers around a single model’s guess.

Dark Sky Data Visualization Open Source pySTEPS Weather WebGL