They called him the Angel of Darkness. But this astronomer just wanted to keep West Texas skies pure. – mySA

Bill Wren remembers exactly where he was when he was first called the Angel of Darkness.

He doesn't remember the year, but it was at a Texas Star Party, an annual gathering of 500 or so amateur astronomers held at the Prude Ranch in Fort Davis, Texas. Wren, a longtime advocate for the dark skies movement against light pollution as a staffer at UT's McDonald Observatory, was well known by that point, so a Texas Star Party attendee introduced him to a crowd with a new heavy metal-sounding nickname.

"It got a real nice laugh, and it got repeated," Wren says. "The media picked it up."

Wren is good-natured talking about the stark sobriquet even though if it's not his favorite. But if it gets people talking about the necessary steps to keep the night sky dark and the stars bright, he'll make the sacrifice.

"I'm willing to go along with just about anything, but I don't care for the moniker very much. I can do without it," Wren laughs. "Whatever works, you know?"

Earlier this week, Wren retired from the McDonald Observatory, where he made dark skies education and advocacy his work for 32 years.

"The skies over McDonald Observatory are among the darkest of any professional observatory in the United States, in no small measure thanks to Bill Wren," Taft Armandroff, director of McDonald Observatory, said in a statement upon Wren's retirement.

Wren says it was time for him to pack it in, to give someone else a chance to take the baton and run with it. "Life is short. I was past due. The pandemic made things a little less fun, working from home all the time," he says.

That home was university housing at the observatory. The University of Texas at Austin, which operates the McDonald Observatory, chose West Texas' Davis Mountains for its site in 1933 because its skies are some of the darkest in the United States. Since then, light pollution has worsened, especially with drilling rigs cropping up in West Texas during oil booms. Every time that happens, bright lights shine into the night skies, which is detrimental to both the enjoyment of the cosmic view and the scientific work conducted by astronomers at the McDonald Observatory.

USA, Texas, Fort Davis, McDonald Observatory. Houses 430 inch Hobby-Eberly Telescope. Elevation 6791 feet.

A self-taught astronomer, Wren grew up in the hills of Missouri, where, he says, "the starry sky was splendid, almost like wallpaper." He moved to Houston at 15, and noticed that the sky looked different in the city after dusk. On a hunch, he drove out on 290 toward Hempstead. He was awestruck by the stars in the dark night sky.

"Wow, you know, you couldn't see that when I looked at yesterday," Wren remembers thinking. "And it's certainly gotten a lot worse."

That realization led to a lifelong interest in amateur astronomy, beginning with spotting Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons from his backyard. He eventually bought a larger telescope and started traveling more with his Peterson Field Guide,learning the night sky over the course of a few years. While working at a runaway shelter in Austin and helping a state agency start its suicide hotline, he tutored astronomy students at UT Austin using his self-taught knowledge. He met Frank Bash, UT astronomy professor and the director of the McDonald Observatory, who was impressed with Wren and let him know that the visitor's center had a job opening.

"Thirty days later I pulled the plug on my counseling career in Austin and moved to West Texas," Wren says. "March 1, 1990 was just in time for spring break. It was baptism by fire."

During Wren's second month in Fort Davis, he was encouraged to attend a meeting of the International Dark Sky Association at the University of Arizona campus. He learned that areas could be well-lit without polluting the sky, that people were wasting light and ruining beautiful sights and complicating research for astronomers.

"I wouldn't call it a born-again experience because it's almost like being evangelized," Wren says. "It was just like wow, this is I need to help spread the word on this."

So that's what he did.

The summer Milky Way rises over the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas.

In addition to hosting Star Parties and giving tours, Wren gave talks on dark skies for years. It was around 2011, during the oil and gas boom in the Permian Basin, he realized he needed to work directly with companies to keep the skies dark. It wasn't just the drilling sites, but from the adjacent commerce hotels, new housing, chain stores that comes with oil exploration. He remembers giving a presentation to San Antonio-based Pioneer Energy Services, whose president owned a ranch outside Marathon.

"He was waxing poetically about seeing the Milky Way horizon-to-horizon," Wren says. "He said, 'Yes, this is worth protecting, here's our fleet of drilling rigs. See what you can do with the lighting."

Around that time Wren stopped most of his other work at the observatory to focus on dark skies full time. He worked with many oil and gas companies to alter their lighting systems to reduce light pollution, he says, without much pushback at all. In fact, in most cases the sites became safer and with higher visibility and reduced glare, a true win-win for each side.

"And they do recognize the value in the night sky," Wren says. "Many of them do ... well, probably many of them don't. But there are people that get it."

Though light pollution can be reversed, dark skies are disappearing around the country as fewer locations with high visibility remain truly remote. Even though Wren is retiring, he is still staying active in the dark skies community from his new home in Cloudcroft, New Mexico.

"The places where people can go to see an actually dark night sky are rapidly shrinking and becoming fewer and farther between," Wren says. "And it's becoming the case that McDonald Observatory in particular, but the Big Bend region in general, is being recognized as a dark sky destination, a place where people can take in the night sky something with which most of us have lost track of the wonder, the splendor of it all. We're trying to get people to buy into preserving the night skies in far West Texas."

Wren says the best way for people to get the picture is to get a visual demonstration. He says that once you see the effects of light pollution on dark skies, you can't unsee it.

"Being able to do a demonstration or being able to point it out to someone so they can see it with their own eyes can be a very powerful, life altering thing," Wren says. "For some pool souls, it'll be cursing my name til the day they die."

Such is the blessing and the curse of the Angel of Darkness.

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They called him the Angel of Darkness. But this astronomer just wanted to keep West Texas skies pure. - mySA