connie walker national optical astronomy observatory

Connie Walker National Optical Astronomy Observatory

Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference

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Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference 2

Globe at Night Program

www.globeatnight.org

Creating multi- media experiences

Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference

Spin-off Programs

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CCEL

Teaching coordinators, teachers & students

Researching with undergrads

Organizing conference sessions


From literature research and a presentation

•  2nd grade “Dark Skies Rangers”

•  Awards at Festival of Stars


To advocacy to other countries


To an entire state star party with a Globe at Night theme

•  40+ statewide

star parties in NC in April

•  Morehead

Planetarium (Amy Sayle)

•  6th graders teachers & their students

•  2 in-situ workshops, multiple Facetime sessions, light pollution activities, capstone project presentations

To conceptually foundational projects – learning about energy

consumption

8 Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference


To a BioBlitz 2011 Night Sky Inventory

100 time brighter at city center than 25 mi away

To visualizing data and affecting lighting ordinances

High school students with amateur astronomers from Norman, Oklahoma

Elementary & middle school students near South Bend, IN

Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference Vienna, Austria


•  Roland Dechesne in his car (with sunroof)

•  394 measurements in & around Calgary (400 km)

•  Used Globe at Night data to create dark skies bylaws

As well as dark skies bylaws in Canada

Tucson Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference

•  Past 4 summers, have provided research experiences to 6 undergraduates on light pollution.

•  Projects: Behavior of light pollution over time in & around a city; distribution behavior of Lesser Long Nosed bats; spectroscopy of lights

•  Summer of research at NOAO; presentations at IDA & AAS

To Research Experiences for Undergraduates

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Kitt Peak Nat’l Observatory vs Tucson


•  No moon •  No bad weather •  No Milky Way

Composites of seasonal variations


Validation of the Data

Citizen Science Provides Valuable Datafor Monitoring Global Night SkyLuminanceChristopher C. M. Kyba1,2, Janna M. Wagner2, Helga U. Kuechly2, Constance E. Walker3,

Christopher D. Elvidge4, Fabio Falchi5, Thomas Ruhtz1, Jurgen Fischer1 & Franz Holker2

1Institute for Space Sciences, Freie Universitat Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries,Berlin, Germany, 3National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona, USA, 4National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 5Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute (ISTIL), Thiene, Italy.

The skyglow produced by artificial lights at night is one of the most dramatic anthropogenic modificationsof Earth’s biosphere. The GLOBE at Night citizen science project allows individual observers to quantifyskyglow using star maps showing different levels of light pollution. We show that aggregated GLOBE atNight 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. Thestandard 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 asubset of the GLOBE at Night data. Although we find the World Atlas overestimates sky brightness in thevery center of large cities, its predictions for Milky Way visibility are accurate.

The development of personal computers, the global positioning system, mobile electronic devices, and aboveall the Internet, have enabled projects that would have seemed impossible two decades ago. A strikingexample of this was given by the successful identification of the locations of ten objects placed in the

contiguous US in only 9 hours1. Citizen science projects are the scientific equivalent of crowdsourced projectslike the Wikipedia and open street maps. The number and scope of such projects has increased greatly in recentyears thanks to simplified geolocation and the Internet2,3. Some early projects involved the passive participation ofinterested citizens, who allowed their personal computers to be used as part of a distributed network to performmassive computations as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home)4 or protein folding5.The success of these projects led to greater interaction between the participants and scientists, and citizenscientists have now classified the morphologies of hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan DigitalSky Survey6, predicted protein structures using the Foldit game7, and provided improved solutions to the MultipleSequence Alignment problem of comparative genomics8. Teams of citizen scientists are now even designing newproteins, for example an enzyme with 18 fold increased activity9.

GLOBE at Night is a citizen science project related to light pollution, and has been running since 2006. Thescientific goal of the GLOBE at Night project is to enable citizen scientists worldwide to quantify the degree ofartificial skyglow at their location. Skyglow, a form of light pollution, is caused by the scattering of artificial light inthe atmosphere. It is a major global environmental concern, both because of its known and potential ecologicaleffects10–13, and because of the large amount of electrical energy required for its generation14. In stark contrast tothe situation in daytime, the luminance of the night sky at locations on the Earth’s surface is very poorly known,and the GLOBE at Night data aim to help patch this hole in our understanding of the biosphere. In addition toassembling a scientific data set, the GLOBE at Night project also aims to raise awareness of the economic costs andenvironmental impacts of skyglow among the citizen scientists who submit their observations.

Figure 1 demonstrates the difference in character between celestially lit (i.e. pristine) sites and artificially litsites. The GLOBE at Night project makes use of this phenomenon to quantitatively classify the skyglow luminanceby its relation to stellar visibility (‘‘seeing’’). However, many factors other than skyglow affect stellar visibility, forexample the humidity and airmass in the direction of observation15. Some factors reduce stellar visibility byincreasing the point spread function of stars (e.g. observer visual acuity16), some by reducing the signal tobackground ratio through the addition of direct (e.g. airglow) or scattered light (e.g. the Moon), and others

SUBJECT AREAS:ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE

ASTRONOMY ANDASTROPHYSICS

CHARACTERIZATION ANDANALYTICAL

TECHNIQUES

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Received

19 March 2013

Accepted

29 April 2013

Published

16 May 2013

Correspondence andrequests for materials

should be addressed toC.C.M.K. (christopher.

[email protected])

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS | 3 : 1835 | DOI: 10.1038/srep01835 1

This paper shows that the “aggregated GLOBE at Night data depend strongly on artificial skyglow, and could be used to track lighting changes worldwide.”

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130516/srep01835/full/srep01835.html

Future Plans for GLOBE at Night

•  Improve upon the GaN website

•  Include new visual measurement app (“Loss of the Night”)

•  Include new “Dark Sky Meter” app

•  Offer Globe at Night Year-Round (focusing on areas of the world)

•  Create on-line tools for data analysis

14 Science for All Citizens: Many Ways to Make a Difference

GLOBE AT NIGHT Citizen Science Campaign

To Measure Night Sky Brightness

globeatnight.org

Five of the 2014 campaign dates:

January 20 - 29, 2014 February 19 - 28, 2014 March 21 - 30, 2014 April 20 - 29, 2014 May 19 - 28, 2014


Connie Walker National Optical Astronomy Observatory [email protected] 520-318-8535

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connie walker national optical astronomy observatory

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