Save Our Skies! Participate in GLOBE at Night Project

We are losing our night skies and from March 8 - 21 you can help do something about it.

Slowly but surely, the stars are fading from view. On average, when we look up at the sky on a clear, dark night, we can see only about 3000 stars and that number is getting smaller all the time.

The reasons are simple: we are flooding the sky with light. Light from buildings, houses, parking lots, etc are drowning out the stars and planets. Constellations are getting harder to find because not all of the stars are visible anymore and the Milky Way has all but vanished in urban areas.

This must stop. We are losing our connection to the stars, the universe.

Below is one of my favorite pictures ever taken by NASA:

Image Credit: NASA Visible Earth

The above image is of a cloudless Earth taken at night. It was taken by satellites over the course of several months and all images with no clouds were pieced together. I have a framed version of this in my office.

While that image is quite beautiful, it’s also very distressing. Clearly visible are where the major technological areas of the planet are spewing light up into the sky. This image, taken 30 years from now, will look even worse if we don’t do something about it.

But, what can we do? I plan to write several posts on that very thing this week. Starting with this one.

GLOBE at Night

The very first thing I want to tell you about is GLOBE at Night. From March 8-21, people can look up into the sky and report what the skies look like in their area. This project is characterized as

an educational citizen-science program rather than a purely scientific campaign

But the organizers believe that the data collected will be useful scientifically.

What you have to do couldn’t be simpler. You look up, locate the constellation Orion and compare what you see with these magnitude charts, then you simply report what your observation. This is not as accurate as I’d like, but it’s certainly better than nothing and will provide some good estimates for the seeing conditions from all over the planet. I’m quite excited to see the results.

This is a great activity to do with your kids, take ‘em outside and have them make the measurement, there’s a family packet, a teacher packet as well as lots of great activities. If you’re a teacher or parent, this is a great time to do some real science as a family or class.

I urge all of you to participate. It’s simple and it gets you involved to help solve the serious problem of light pollution.

Taken from GLOBE at Night website:

1. Find your latitude and longitude.
2. Find Orion.
3. Match your nighttime sky with one of our magnitude charts
4. Report your observations
5. Compare your observations to thousands around the world.

Everything is laid out clearly on the site, even people who’ve never really looked up before can make this observation. They have made it trivial.

I think this will provide an interesting glimpse into the changing skies around the world. I plan to make observations from several locations around Colorado. As it happens, a friend is coming to visit me over Spring Break and we will be traveling all over Colorado, I’ll submit observations from each place we visit.

Click here, go forth and save our skies.