Passed 10,000 submitted observations!

The Loss of the Night app project passed an arbitrary (yet still exciting) milestone at the end of January: The 10,000th observation submitted to the GLOBE at Night server.  The number includes submissions with the test version of the app: we will probably cross 10,000 submissions by people running release 1.0.0 or higher tonight.

I promised to send a holographic postcard to the citizen scientist who submitted the complete observation closest to #10,000, but unfortunately the user is in Japan, and I think my (English) email informing the person that he or she has won a prize and asking for his or her mailing address may have been flagged as spam...  I am still trying to contact the contributor, but for now, let's celebrate observation #10,005, which was the second closest to #10,000.

Data from observation #10005

The observation was made inside of Luxembourg City, and was especially useful because 15 stars were observed instead of the minimum 7. Stars which were seen are marked in black, stars which were invisible are empty red circles, and stars that the user wasn't sure about are blue. The best fit for the naked eye limiting magnitude was 2.55 (solid line), with an estimated range of +/-0.6 over which the observer was likely to have trouble deciding whether the stars were visible or not.

In the next version of the app, we intend to provide instant feedback to you about what the naked eye limiting magnitude is at your site, and how consistent your results were. We will also do a much better job of sampling both sides of the estimated NELM, and we will get rid of most of the pesky stars that are hard to identify (did you hear that Draco?).

Locations where the app has been used.

Above is the most recent plot of all of the places on Earth that people have used the app (up to February 5). The black dots mark the 1208 places where the observations can be used for our analysis (no clouds, no twilight, no moonlight, and at least 7 stars observed), and the red dots show locations where this criteria wasn't met. It's fantastic that so many of you from around the world are contributing to the project, and I hope that we'll continue to increase add new citizen scientists as the year rolls on! Thank you for participation!