You Can Help Measure Light Pollution with Your Phone - by PaulMattSutter
. Different satellites and different measuring techniques can give wildly different estimates for the amount of blue light pollution, differing by as much as 200%.
Measuring the color of the light is important because not every biological process is sensitive to the all colors of light equally. For example, one species of nocturnal animal may be absolutely fine with redder colored night lighting, but be completely disrupted by blueish hues.. The project consists of an app that you can download onto your smartphone. You then simply take pictures of any of the light sources that you see.
The app will then upload the information to a database tagged with your location and correlate that information with light pollution maps given by satellites. This way, the astronomers hope to correct and calibrate the information provided by the satellites so that we have a more accurate measurement of the color spectrum of our light pollution.
The team of astronomers have already completed a pilot program to demonstrate that their app pipeline and data acquisition and calibration steps all work correctly. They are now advocating to roll out the app worldwide to engage more citizen scientists. If you’d like to participate, you can check out
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