The 2014 GLOBE at Night campaign officially starts tonight, and the organizers need you to take part! In the GLOBE at Night project, people go out at night to spend a few minutes looking at the stars, and then report how many stars are visible. This generates Citizen Science data, which is really important for tracking how the brightness of the night sky is changing over time.
The world is undergoing a revolution in outdoor lighting due to the adoption of LEDs. No one is sure whether this will make the sky brighter or darker, and the best Earth Observing nighttime satellite isn't sensitive to much of the light produced by LEDs. So the ONLY way that we can really measure how the sky is changing is by having citizen scientists tell us what they see.
So please, take a moment on a clear night sometime this year to go outside, visit the stars, and let us know how many you can see.
In 2014, there are three ways to take part in GLOBE at Night:
1) The traditional web app (available in 20 languages!)
2) Using our Loss of the Night app (available in 11 languages - Android)
3) Using the Dark Sky Meter app (iOS)
Your data is valuable regardless of where you live, but we have a particularly strong need for people from brightly lit cities to take part. Multiple observations on different days (or observations using two or more methods) are especially valuable, because they improve the accuracy of the measurement.
We know that the night sky is changing. But we won't know how it's changing without your help.
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