This is often helpful because of the difficulty of fully knowing just how any particular lighting will actually look and feel. Members of a planning board, and other interested citizens, can provide valuable reactions to such mock-ups. Yet it is important nonetheless, profoundly so. We human beings lose something of ourselves when we can no longer look up and see our place in the universe. Such a loss might be acceptable if light pollution were the inevitable price of progress, but it's not.
Most sky glow, as scientists call it, is unnecessary.
The light that obscures our view of the night sky comes mainly from inefficient lighting sources that do little to increase nighttime safety, utility or security. On clear nights I like to walk outside my house in central Vermont and be lifted into the vast wheel of the glittering sky. As a child I learned to search first for the Big Dipper and then, following its pointer stars, to find Polaris, the locus for sky-watching in New England. The easiest constellation to detect was Orion and his tough dog, with its studded collar and popeye. That eye is Sirius, a star that is twenty times brighter than the sun though far more distant.