Let me see your city during earth hour.

I am sad to say I'm not impressed with my city's effort

[k100d]

nice perspective! do you live on Toronto Island?
did you expect absolute darkness :P ... that's not a bad effort IMO, about half of the lights are off on the tall buildings

[JCSullivan]

I suppose K100 is right - that's pretty darn good for TO. Some of the lights have to remain on for security reasons and the towers have to have a number of lights due to aircraft.

None for me since I was sleeping because of the night shift BUT, I wish they would do this sometime during the summer so I could get some night-sky shots WITHOUT light pollution. Did anyone take that advantage a shoot some?

[Lowell Goudge]

nice perspective! do you live on Toronto Island?
did you expect absolute darkness :P ... that's not a bad effort IMO, about half of the lights are off on the tall buildings

Thanks

No I live in the west end, and the vantage point I had is in a park that extends out into Lake Ontario. It overlooks directly Ontario Place and the CNE grounds, and is a favourite spot for people to watch the annual air show from, as most of the planes turn driectly over the park.

As to the expected impact, after seeing the photos from down under for last' years event, I thought there would be more impact in the downtown core.

In the suburbs, my impression was that this was observed by about 80% of the houses, so I was expecting a little more dramatic impact on the skyline.

I plan to go back and take the same shot in a few days to see the real difference, to me, as a resident, it did not seem significant.

[Lowell Goudge]

I suppose K100 is right - that's pretty darn good for TO. Some of the lights have to remain on for security reasons and the towers have to have a number of lights due to aircraft.

speaking of aircraft, you will note what I think was an A320 on the left side, and a small cesna traversing the top. Exposure was 30 seconds for this shot.

None for me since I was sleeping because of the night shift BUT, I wish they would do this sometime during the summer so I could get some night-sky shots WITHOUT light pollution.

you will notice the "glow" in the background, in fact, the sky over the city remained much lighter than the foreground water

Did anyone take that advantage a shoot some?

This is why I posted the photos, I want to see more in this thread. I tried posting a thread here asking what people were doing about 2 months ago, but it got no responses.

[daacon]

Nice shot Lowell - I was thinking about taking a cityscape, however for us the Edmonton - Calgary game started at 08:00 pm the same time as earth hour ,and since we are still not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet , well, I watched it. (and we won , keeping the faint flicker of hope alive)

I am not sure how we did overall as a country. I did hear about 55,000 people registered , pretty anemic for 35 million or so ...(and I was one of the anemic ones). It was a good idea none the less and that is a very good shot.

[Lowell Goudge]

Nice shot Lowell

Thanks

- I was thinking about taking a cityscape, however for us the Edmonton - Calgary game started at 08:00 pm the same time as earth hour ,and since we are still not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet , well, I watched it. (and we won , keeping the faint flicker of hope alive)

you mean your team can't play in the dark, the leafs have been doing it for years now

I am not sure how we did overall as a country. I did hear about 55,000 people registered , pretty anemic for 35 million or so ...(and I was one of the anemic ones). It was a good idea none the less and that is a very good shot.

I think by yesterday there were about 250,000 in the toronto area that registered, still pretty bad for an urbnan area of over 6 million

[J.Scott]

The "Earth Hour" is only there to raise awareness to the whole climate/environmental issues the planet is facing. In terms of saving energy the financial/environmental savings gained in this one hour will be pretty insignificant compared to the total year. What really counts is what people are doing each and every day.

Personally we changed almost all the incandescent bulbs to the mini fluorescent type in our home. Some, like outside motion sensor security lights, work more efficiently in cold weather with normal incandescent bulbs; but I want to change those to battery lamps. We re-insulated the whole house, changed all the windows to double paned ones and made improvements to our boiler/furnace. We are fortunate and don't need an AC unit as it really isn't that hot here in the summer. I am also fortunate that I live close enough to work that I have walked there for the past 18 1/2 years. But I know I could make more improvements - like using cold water to wash clothes and hanging wet laundry to dry rather than use the electric clothes dryer - and I will.

It's all about having a conscious attitude to use less energy where possible. Earth hour was hopefully a wake up call for some and an incentive for others to keep going in the right direction.

I should have taken a picture of a candle as that was my source of light last night for 'Earth Hour'.

[J.Scott]

I was in Toronto a couple weeks ago at a convention and stayed at the Sheraton Center downtown. As a matter of course, I took some pictures! The shot here is taken at 8:30 in the evening. Most of the buildings are office towers and are most likely unoccupied at this time of night due to the mass exodus of people from the downtown core between 5:00 and 6:00! In fact, the large, odd shaped building closest is Toronto City Hall. Why, in the name of energy conservation, are all these lights on? If it is just a skeleton office crew and some cleaning staff can they not light up areas as needed? This to me is extremely wasteful; and I am sure it happens in every major city in North America. This is where we need to conserve.

[lithos]

I do believe North Korea's gonna kick everybody's arse at this.

[frogger]

There were a few before/after pics in this video
TheStar.com - Video Viewer - Toronto goes dark

TheStar.com - Photo Viewer

[Lowell Goudge]

I was in Toronto a couple weeks ago at a convention and stayed at the Sheraton Center downtown. As a matter of course, I took some pictures! The shot here is taken at 8:30 in the evening. Most of the buildings are office towers and are most likely unoccupied at this time of night due to the mass exodus of people from the downtown core between 5:00 and 6:00! In fact, the large, odd shaped building closest is Toronto City Hall. Why, in the name of energy conservation, are all these lights on? If it is just a skeleton office crew and some cleaning staff can they not light up areas as needed? This to me is extremely wasteful; and I am sure it happens in every major city in North America. This is where we need to conserve.

One could joke that since the popular belief is that no onw actually works in government anyway, why do they need lights at all. That is a little unfair of course.

Actually I think there is a tendancy to light city hall in virtually every city as a land mark.

SOmeone else commented about changing all the lights to compact flourescents, while that is good for the CO2 emissions, there is a small ammount of mercury in each bulb. We don't want those ending up in land fills either, they need a recycling program for them.

[J.Scott]

Interesting notation; only Canadians and one person from Australia responded to this thread. Maybe this event didn't occur in Europe, the UK, Asia, Russia or the USA. Or no one cares.

Interesting notation; Or no one cares.

Might be something to that.

[AKiss20]

Well I don't live in a big city (far from it) so I couldn't take any cool shots of Earth hour, but my family did participate. I was editing pictures in the pure darkness, it was pretty cool!