Light Pollution Blots Out The Stars for 99% of U.S. and Europe
Artificial lights raise night sky luminance, creating the most visible effect of light pollution—artificial skyglow. Despite the increasing interest among scientists in fields such as ecology, astronomy, health care, and land-use planning, light pollution lacks a current quantification of its magnitude on a global scale.
Credit: Falchi et al., Sci. Adv., Jakob Grothe/NPS contractor, Matthew Price/CIRES. Check out the globe version of the atlas, too
Major advances over a similar atlas from 2001 were possible thanks to a new satellite, and to the recent development of inexpensive sky radiance meters. City lighting information for the atlas came from the American Suomi NPP satellite, which includes the first instrument intentionally designed to make accurate observations of urban lights from space. The atlas was calibrated using data from “Sky Quality Meters” at 20,865 individual locations around the world.
The participation of citizen scientists in collecting the calibration data was critical, according to Dr. Christopher Kyba, a study co-author, and researcher at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. “Citizen scientists provided about 20% of the total data used for the calibration, and without them we would not have had calibration data from countries outside of Europe and North America.”
“The community of scientists who study the night have eagerly anticipated the release of this new Atlas” said Dr. Sibylle Schroer, who coordinates the EU funded “Loss of the Night Network and is not one of the study’s authors. The director of the International Dark-Sky Association, Scott Feierabend also hailed the work as a major breakthrough, saying “the new atlas acts as a benchmark, which will help to evaluate the success or failure of actions to reduce light pollution in urban and natural areas”.
Credit: Mudassir Ahmed
Contacts and sources:
Josef Zens
GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
Citation: The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness: Science Advances 10 Jun 2016:
Vol. 2, no. 6, e1600377 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600377
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/06/light-pollution-blots-out-stars-for-99.html
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