Light Pollution Mapping from a Stratospheric High-Altitude Balloon Platform

Abstract

The NITELite (Night Imaging of Terrestrial Environments Lite) system is a method of collecting regional-scale light emissions data from a latex high-altitude balloon (LHAB) platform. An LHAB can reach altitudes of 25-30km from where the nighttime imaging is performed. LHAB missions are relatively low cost (<$2000US/flight) and easy to repeat. A NITELite mission collects data with high resolution (<10m/px), color information (RGB) over a region of thousands of square kilometers. This system provides a new source of data for remote sensing of artificial light at night (ALAN) research, filling the data gap between aerial and satellite observations. Nighttime LHAB-based imaging can provide data to support fields of ALAN research such as observation of real-time variability, monitoring effects of seasonal changes and events of interest, and measuring angular dependence of ALAN sources. NITELite includes an imaging system, an inertial and positional recording on-board-computer, and an altitude control system. Preliminary results demonstrate the potential of this method for future ALAN research.

A Scoring Model for Regional Light Pollution

“…There is no shelter around on the high mountain, and the light is easy to spread. In addition, the higher altitude makes it easy for light to hit the sky and cause light pollution [10]. This paper grades the Topography as B-level, 80 points.…”

Night Sky Brightness Measurement, Quality Assessment and Monitoring

“…NSB is now routinely measured by remotely sensing upward-directed radiance using a variety of platforms, including Earth-orbiting satellites, [99] the International Space Station [100], airplanes, [101,102] drones [103] and balloons. [104,105] The use of remote sensing to infer NSB in this manner offers a number of attractive qualities. Chief among these is the ability to collect information about NSB from essentially anywhere on Earth, which decouples NSB measurement and monitoring from the deployment of ground-based sensors.…”

X,Y, and Z: A bird's eye view on light pollution

“…The multi‐angle measurements of ALAN are essential to improve existing remote sensing retrievals and may even allow for entirely new remote sensing analyses. However, due to the laboriousness of today's multi‐angle measurement methods, they are still rare (Kyba et al, 2022 ; Walczak et al, 2021 ), and new methods to reduce the effort of acquiring the data are desirable.…”