Take Back the Night — Fight Light Pollution

Last year's GLOBE at Night observations

Some New Yorkers never look up.  They think it makes them look like tourists, or maybe a bird will poop in their eye.

If you do look at the night sky, you don’t see many stars. They can’t compete with New York City’s bright light show.

But it’s not just New York City. This is a worldwide phenomenon and it’s getting worse. We are so star deprived that during blackouts, people call 911 because they’ve just seen the Milky Way for the first time and think it’s an alien invasion.

During the next two weeks, March 3 – 16, people all over the world will measure the brightness of their night sky.  By observing the constellation Orion each night, ordinary citizens can correlate what they see to star magnitude charts and submit their data. You can even compare what you see to what others all over the world see.

This initiative, GLOBE at Night, started as a small grassroots project eight years ago between Tucson, Arizona and La Serena, Chile, the sister telescope sites of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). School children in both locations observed Orion and compared what they saw to charts that had progressively more and more stars. Since then, the program has expanded, with over 15,000 people from 70 countries participating.

Constance Walker, director of the GLOBE at Night campaign, said that last year, in one Indiana school district, thousands of students charted the light pollution in their neighborhoods.

“But they did not stop there,” Walker wrote in an email. “They asked the question: how much of our night sky have we lost? To find the answer, the students visualized the sky with a 3-D model of their Globe at Night sky measurements. First they stacked 35,000 LEGO® blocks to represent a pristinely dark sky in which 1000’s of stars could be seen, and then they took away 12,000 blocks according to their Globe at night sky measurements. What remained corresponded to a sky 9 times brighter than the truly dark ideal.”

Nine times brighter than the ideal dark sky. That’s Indiana, mind you.

In New York City, the Inwood Astronomy Project will be out every evening these two weeks in March to chart the stars. If you can’t make it all the way up there, download your own star charts and have a look yourself.  Just look for the three stars of Orion’s belt. The two stars above are his shoulder and the two below are his knees.

One of Orion’s stars is Betelgeuse, an irregularly pulsing red supergiant and the 11th brightest star in the sky. Astronomers say within the next 1,000 years, it will supernova and be visible in the daytime. With a very good telescope (like Hubble) you can see the Horsehead Nebula.

For more information, listen to this podcast and go to this  Web site. You don’t need a telescope or any special equipment. Have fun and dress warm.