Why do street lights at night sometimes just go out seemingly at random, and later turn back on?
Also, what the hell is the star at the end of street name signs that are there sometimes?
Often street lights turn off when a leaf or something else falls on the photo-sensor that turns it on. Some may intentionally or unintentionally turn off when heat causes a circuit to open up.
What star?
Most street light come on when it’s dark and turn off when it’s light. Sometimes when a car goes across a dip in the road the headlights will hit the light sensor in the street light as the front of the car bounces back up and aims the headlights higher than normal for a moment. The light goes off almost immediately, but takes a few minutes to come back on. Once I was made aware of this I could usually predict which lights were likely to go out when cars went through certain intersections.
Could the Star mean the street was named to honor a Veteran?
Sort of like this link discusses?
possibly, with the star thing, I’ve been told that. But I’ve also seen things like that for historica things, but much showier, on street signs. The thing I’m talking about is just a very plain star shape, usually the same color as the letters.
One of the most common failure modes for sodium vapour lamps results in them switching off and on cyclically with a period between tens of seconds and a minute or two.
Discussed a little here: Sodium-vapor lamp - Wikipedia
In this area, you can tell what city you’re in by the shape, size, color, and design of the street signs. Perhaps the star is simply part of the design of the signs where you are.
That seems . . . odd. Wouldn’t the leaf block the light reaching the sensor and, so, turn it on?
So it’s not a yellow Star of David? Good, because you know who made people and signs wear those!
As a kid we would kick the street light pole hard and the light would go out for a few minutes. So I guess vibration caused some sort of temporary problem.
Yes, that would be odd. That’s why they don’t turn off sometimes. I’m having a bad day, sorry.
Mangetout has the answer. when vapor-arc lamps start “cycling,” they’re toast.
Here too. Many, but not all, municipal borders are marked with border signs (e.g. “Leaving County X, entering County Y”), but they have their own street sign styles that are recognizable. One uses black lettering on white signs. One uses white on blue. Another also uses white on blue, but makes the letters taller and narrower. One jurisdiction has red on white. Another has white on green. And so on. So even if you didn’t see the border sign (or there wasn’t one the way you went), you can tell you crossed the border because the signs are suddenly different.
The light in front of our house was cycling for a while several years back. They’ve since replaced all the street lights with LED lights. I’m thinking that street lights going out randomly will another one of those things kids won’t understand in another twenty years or so, as the lights that do this are all replaced.
Questions like these are unanswerable unless you tell us where on Earth you are. Even if I told you exactly what those stars mean in my town, that will tell you exactly zero about what they mean in your town.
So where are you?
Perhaps it is you. 
The Master speaks.
Why would you try to conjure that spectre?
The vibration idea might explain the phomenon of people who seem to be able to make street lights go out when they walk under them. Perhaps, under certain unusual circumstances factors like light location, the person’s walking gait, and such things allign in a way that vibrations cause the street light to go out. I sometimes had this happen in college, and it might be relevant that the light it happened to most often was on a bridge.
Might the star on the street sign indicate a main road that gets plowed first? Minneapolis has different background colors for the different routes.
Yeah, when I was 16 and driving, kids would go out to spot deer. Invariably, we would turn off streetlights by nailing them with our spotlight.