Great streetlamps in a Spanish village

Last summer I spent a single night in the Spanish village of Sant Pau d'Ordal. My room had a balcony, and a colleague and I spent several hours in the evening sitting on the balcony, talking shop, and watching a distant thunderstorm. The experience was really enjoyable, thanks to the well directed lighting in the village. Here is the view of the street from the balcony:

This work by Christopher Kyba is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This work by Christopher Kyba is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

If the village lamps had directed light upwards, then the balcony would have been flooded with glaring light, and the experience would have been much less enjoyable. Beyond the full cutoff nature of the lamps, I was also impressed with the extent to which they kept the light on the street and sidewalk, and avoided lighting the trees. Here's the view from street level in daytime, notice the flat full cutoff design:

This work by Christopher Kyba is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Great job Sant Pau d'Ordal, and thanks for a wonderful experience!

Instructional video for the Loss of the Night app

Here is a video tutorial for using the Loss of the Night app.

It was created by two students at Brandeis University, Anna Bulger and Mei Cornue-Hollander. The video was part of their coursework in Colleen Hitchcock's "Citizen Science: Bridging Science, Education and Advocacy" course at Brandeis. Thank you very much Mei and Anna!

If you prefer text to video, you can also find instructions for both Android and iOS here on the blog.