it may be hard to believe but i used to support the dark sky agency,before you say im one of them listen,after reading many of the articles posted by the dark sky nuts as i like to call them its not hard to figure out their the reason mercury vapor is no longer legible in the us (in goverment terms that is)its probably them getting rid of the older streetlights as well even though older lights have proven to last many years while new installations dont even see 1 year.how do they sleep at night knowing there trashing pieces of history easy they have nothing telling them from right and wrong ,while they claim that their helping there actually hurting the lighting industry,they care about nothing but their stars dont get me wrong i like stars too but is crossing the line to ban the importation of new ballasts,and now they have the nerve to try to ban metal halide lamps?now we have a problem a war is raging between the dsa and streetlight lovers like you and me, like daveman said : we cant let them win,spread the word. dont let the dsa get in your head.

One thing I do know that Dark Sky does allow you to keep any older lighting from 1950 or before.....that would include those old OV-20s and Form 109s!

That's nothing. I was against all form of electric lamps except LEDs before I started collecting them and well before this place.

FGS, I used to think LED will be great for general lighting until I saw a lot of the performance stuff and saw the fact that they get sooo dim and loses a lot of lumen in life, and actually in first place didn't have enough crisp light, so I'm against LED as general lighting but I AGREE LEDs for traffic lights, car tail lights, flash lights, book light, decorative lighting effect and changing color party lights and Christmas Lights......

tudorwhiz why should they decide what clasics stay and which ones go,all clasics made between 1940 and 1985 deserves to be in its rightful place on the street on in a parkinglot not in the scrapyard!!!.dsa makes me sick

I think every group has it's extremeists, and IDA is no exception.  There might even be a few among us
I try to use DS-friendly practices whenever practical in my lighting jobs, such as my cutoff driveway light, but would also gladly use a historical light within reason if I had one.
I think that the main source of light pollution isn't people's mercury vapor barn buckets, but most of it comes from street and commercial lot lighting.  Banning MV barn buckets isn't going to make the orange glow over my home town go away.  I believe some of that came from poorly planned lighting conversions. 
In my home town, they would go through and replace a 400w mercury vapor light with a 400 watt high pressure sodium.  True it maybe a full cutoff cobrahead, but all that extra light is now being focused down onto the ground (which is covered with snow part of the year) and getting reflected back up.
Here in Louisiana, much of the street lighting is from Mercury Vapor NEMA lights at 175 watts.  They provide nice lighting levels without much sky glow.  Where they have been replaced with HPS, they use a near equivalent 100 watt NEMA.  Again, skyglow isn't much of an issue.

Yeah it's ridiculous, you have an organization that knows nothing about lighting and what really makes me mad is they're telling people what kind of lights they can and can't install and that's communism. And also I read somewhere that the government wants to require new metal halide fixtures to use pulse-start lamps. The government and Dark Sky Association shouldn't have any say so about what lights people can make, buy and use. If they're so worried about energy costs, then they should consider doing research on renewable energy. I miss mercury vapor fixtures, but it seems like anything the Dark Sky Association touches, they destroy. Just like they did to mercury vapor ballasts and fixtures and now it's a state and federal law that says you can't even install any new ones which was never mentioned in the ban before. I hope this doesn't happen to metal halide. I don't even like the word ban, it just sounds ignorant.

its not so much that i hate high pressure sodium vapor lamps,its just that i hate having the goverment force it on the streets,it also burns me when they scrap old long lasting fixtures,and replace them with new fixtures that last only months in some cases,well at least you can still purchase mv bulbs and use them on mh ballasts.