The citizen science project I participated in was the Globe at Night project. Globe at Night is a worldwide project dedicated to spreading awareness about light pollution and the problems associated with it. The project collects data points from thousands of people across the world who measure how dark the sky is at night and how many stars they can see. The darker and clearer your sky is, the more stars you can see.
Globe at Night wants to bring awareness to light pollution for a number of reasons, the two most prominent is to draw attention to our electricity consumption, and to advocate for people’s “right to starlight.” They have 8 complete datasets from 2013 to 2006 where you can see the amount of light pollution people are viewing around the world! These are huge datasets that are fantastic for research, so this is a worthwhile project.
I decided to participate in this project because I think that light pollution, especially in New York City, is a huge issue. I’m the stargazer type, I love to look at the stars at night, I even have a telescope that I often try to use. Yet, I can’t use it in the city purely because of light pollution. It’s an unfortunate reality, but I can at least help collect data so we can be smarter about how we use our lights, not just in an urban setting, but across the world as well.
What makes this project so accessible to people across the world is the format in which you participate. Everyone across the world has the night sky available to them, it’s only a matter of having an Internet connection on your phone or computer. For nine days every month you go outside at night and record your observations, here is the simple form that you fill out with your observations:
I participated in the month of November (12th-21st) for seven out of the nine days. I went outside for about 5 minutes every night to observe the urban sky and my surroundings, which was really interesting because I started noticing a lot about my urban setting and how it effected the sky that I had never thought of before. Literally any light source around you was a cause for light pollution, even the light from vending machines! Here is an example of one of my data submissions:
The project really made me more aware of just how light polluted New York City is. Every submission I made, whether it was cloudy or clear skies, always had the same visibility of stars. It was really disappointing to see the negative impacts of such a well-lit city right in front of your eyes.
After submitting all my data, I was curious to see data from previous Globe at Night years. I looked at the 2013 data and wasn’t too surprised at what I saw:
The lighter in color the data points, the more light pollution was observed in that area. It’s no surprise that along the east coast of the United States had the most light pollution since the east coast is so densely populated.
You can also look at 2014 data as it comes in on Google maps. I looked through that data as well and found New York City to be the most light polluted points on the map in the United States!
The very pale yellow spot is New York City that has a Limiting Magnitude (LM) of 0. This means New York City has the lowest amount of sky visibility in the United States from the data we see on this map. The data isn’t final yet since we don’t have any data points from December, but so far this is New York City’s title.
I think this is a really worthwhile and interesting citizen science project, it’s incredibly accessible and provides huge, global databases of raw light pollution data for further research on the subject.
Also – I found my data submissions on the map!
