Citizen Science Provides Valuable Data for Monitoring Global Night Sky Luminance

Abstract

The skyglow produced by artificial lights at night is one of the most dramatic anthropogenic modifications of Earth's biosphere. The GLOBE at Night citizen science project allows individual observers to quantify skyglow using star maps showing different levels of light pollution. We show that aggregated GLOBE at Night data depend strongly on artificial skyglow, and could be used to track lighting changes worldwide. Naked eye time series can be expected to be very stable, due to the slow pace of human eye evolution. The standard deviation of an individual GLOBE at Night observation is found to be 1.2 stellar magnitudes. Zenith skyglow estimates from the “First World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness” are tested using a subset of the GLOBE at Night data. Although we find the World Atlas overestimates sky brightness in the very center of large cities, its predictions for Milky Way visibility are accurate.

High-Resolution Imagery of Earth at Night: New Sources, Opportunities and Challenges

“…Images of the Earth at night are therefore an extremely useful tool for research involving human communities and their interaction with the environment. Night light data have been used in the past to study economic variables [1,2], socio-economic properties [3][4][5], population [6,7] and population density [8], built area [9,10], power consumption [11], greenhouse gas emissions [12], gas flaring [13], atmospheric chemistry [14], skyglow (light pollution) [15][16][17], the epidemiology of illness related to light exposure [18], among other analyses [19].…”

Contributions of artificial lighting sources on light pollution in Hong Kong measured through a night sky brightness monitoring network

“…Satellite imagery taken from the US Air Force Defence Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) 1 sampled large areas of landmass at a moderate spatial resolution (∼ 1 km), making studies of the extent and degree of night time radiation over a metropolis or even globally possible (Kyba et al 2013;Small & Elvidge 2013;Cinzano & Elvidge 2004;Cinzano et al 2001). The nighttime photographs taken by astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) 2 provided even higher spatial resolution (at ∼ 6 m per pixel) for selected locations on Earth.…”

“…Furthermore, many observations were conducted near places where the participants lived, such as city centers or suburban regions, or at places that they could gain access to, such as country parks. Recent comparison of a subset of the GLOBE at Night results with the night-time satellite images illustrated that this kind of study has huge potential for global scale studies of the night sky (Kyba et al 2013).…”

Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing for Earth Observations: An Analysis of Stakeholder Opinions on the Present and Future

“…Although various attempts have been made in the past to survey and exploit the benefits of crowdsourcing and citizen science on Earth and Satellite Observations [33,53], to our knowledge, this is the first time where a variety of stakeholders have been involved in providing their views and opinions on their perception of the current and future state of the field. Hence, the study was aimed at being an exploratory one, with a few open-ended questions to gauge stakeholder perception, and a few categorical questions aimed at understanding expected timelines for the adoption of crowdsourcing/citizen science methodologies.…”