Lighting so bad it could win a prize

 Yesterday I joked on twitter that an image someone shared was so bad it should win a light pollution prize. Other twitterers responded with some of their own contenders. I thought I'd share them here:

I have another contender. At least that one is lighting a street. This one from my neighborhood is lighting a patch of grass... and the sky pic.twitter.com/kywZHY4hAQ

— Ken Walczak (@KWalzar) December 3, 2020

What about the local college's football score board? pic.twitter.com/oVHvdtu5id

— Okie Space Queen (@OkieSpaceQueen) December 3, 2020

How about my inconsiderate neighbor. No one else in the neighborhood of 12 homes leaves lights on all night long. Even after being talked to about, does this out of spite. Real winner. pic.twitter.com/rrKkFhvBJj

— Kevin Cleary (@cleary6876) December 3, 2020

Spanish language instructional video for the Loss of the Night app

Juan Pablo Uchima from the University of La Serena, Chile, created an instructional video for using the Loss of the Night app. Check it out!

Thanks so much for creating this Juan!

 

If anyone is inspired to do the same for another language, be sure to let us know!

Mitforschen!

On October 14-15, Helga Kuechly and I will be presenting a number of our projects related to citizen science and light pollution together with Sibylle Schroer from IGB at the Mitforschen! festival in Berlin. This post is mainly for people who might attend, but the links might also be interesting to other blog readers. The information is repeated in English below the German.

 

Deutsch

 

An unserem Stand werden wir ein tolles Experiment haben, das zeigt, wie eine Reduzierung der Beleuchtung die Sichtbarkeit auf der Straße verbessern und gleichzeitig die Lichtverschmutzung reduzieren kann. Wir haben auch interaktive Medienanzeigen, auf denen ihr Daten zur Lichtverschmutzung untersuchen könnt. Mit Radiance Light Trends könnt ihr testen, wie sich die Lichtemissionen weltweit ändern. Mit My Sky at Night könnt ihr die Nachthimmelbeobachtungen von Bürgerwissenschaftlern aus der ganzen Welt von 2006 bis heute erkunden und unseren Prototyp ausprobieren, der simulieren, wie sich ändernde Lichttechnologien auf den Nachthimmel auswirken. Darüber hinaus präsentieren wir das Projekt "Tatort Straßenbeleuchtung", bei dem es um Artenschutz durch umweltverträgliche Beleuchtung geht. Schließlich werden wir alle Teilnehmenden des Festivals einladen, im Rahmen unseres Nachtlicht-BüHNE-Projekts an einer bürgerwissenschaftlichen Aktivität teilzunehmen: entlang einer Straße in Berlin alle Lichtquellen zählen, die ihr sehen könnt. Diese Daten helfen uns, die Variabilität der Antworten von Person zu Person zu verstehen. Wir freuen uns darauf, dich zu sehen!

English

At our booth, we're going to have a cool visual demo that shows how reducing lighting can improve visibility on the street while reducing light pollution. We'll also have interactive media displays where you can explore data related to light pollution. With Radiance Light Trends, you can test how light emissions are changing around the world. With My Sky at Night, you can explore the night sky observations of citizen scientists from around the world from 2006 until today, and you can also play with a prototype system for simulating how changing lighting technologies changes the night sky. In addition, we will present the "Tatort Streetlight" project about species protection through sustainable lighting. Finally, we will invite everyone at the festival to take part in a citizen science activity as part of our Nachtlicht-BüHNE project: walking down a street in Berlin and counting up all the light sources that you can see. This data will help us understand the variability in responses from person to person. We look forward to seeing you!

Changes in light emissions during the COVID-19 shutdowns

At the start of the lockdown periods in Europe and North America, a few people speculated about what it might mean for changes in light emissions. I was skeptical that we would see much of anything.

That's what I expect as well. The only reduction I can imagine will be from having fewer drivers.

— Christopher Kyba (@skyglowberlin) March 23, 2020

Shortly afterwards, NASA showed some results for Hubei province in China:

Across Hubei, highway closures could be seen from space.

Traffic that once kept roadways alight was gone, and connections from one city to the next disappeared into the darkness #China #Wuhan #COVID19 #coronavirus #maps pic.twitter.com/DrjnSUVgxs

— Joshua Stevens (@jscarto) March 26, 2020

We are still waiting for the monthly satellite data composites for February-April to come out, but I still don't expect to see much in most places. However, it turns out that there were some pretty dramatic changes in at least a few places around the world. The best example I've seen of this comes from Poland. Check out these two photos of Kraków, Poland, that Mateusz Windak posted on a Polish forum:

This work by Mateusz Windak is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Click for the full size version.

Here's what Mateusz had to say about the photos:

The animation shows differences before and after midnight, when the Cracow city lights are switched off. After the switch off, only private light sources and the highway in the foreground remained. The lights were turned off for a month and a half from 00:00 to 04:00 each night due to the lack of traffic during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Cracow has stopped shutting down the lights, but some other cities are still continuing this practice.

The photos were taken from Wieliczka, a neighboring city, using a Mavic Air drone. They are four panel panoramas, the settings for each photograph are: 2s, ISO1600, f/2.8.

Thanks for sharing your photos Mateusz! I find it really impressive that in addition to the lights going off, you can also see the decrease in sky brightness

Panel discussion about light pollution and dark skies

A while back I was invited to be part of a panel discussion titled "Light Pollution & the Dark Sky Movement". Check it out:


[d]arc thoughts: Episode 4 | Light Pollution & the Dark Sky Movement from [d]arc media on Vimeo.

Loss of the Night app video tutorials

A group of undergraduate students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently produced tutorial videos for using the Loss of the Night app. They made separate videos for the Android and iOS versions. Feel free to share them!


Android:





iOS:



Big thanks to Aaron, Kai, Ryan, and Vinit for producing these videos!

Removing natural light from nighttime satellite images

My student Jacqueline Coesfeld recently developed an analysis that will be interesting for readers of the blog who work with satellite data. I summarized it in a series of tweets. You can click on the tweet to read the thread, or see the unrolled version here.

Jacqueline Coesfeld has developed a method to correct monthly Day/Night Band data from @eogatpayne to center areas with no light at zero. Link to the paper: https://t.co/mzcVSoUZ1o

Image shows the result for a random location in the Pacific Ocean. Thread 👇🏿 pic.twitter.com/pmLDdXkJAN

— Christopher Kyba (@skyglowberlin) June 9, 2020

Street view with the lights out

Ken Walczak from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago recently sent me a set of two cool photos I want to share. Here's what he had to say about them:

I got home after an evening event and didn't realize at first why there was such a different quality to the ambience of our neighborhood. It took a moment to realize that due to a film shoot, the city had turned off all the lights on the main streets. I walked the dog, said "Hi" to neighbors walking down the street, just as normal and safe as a typical night. I snapped some photos. I set the exposure to try and capture the visual quality of the experience (1sec f/3.5 at ISO 800). The lights came back on later in the night and I shot with the scene with the same settings.

This work by Ken Walczak is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This work by Ken Walczak is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Animated version

In an area with significant skyglow, I have often found that you actually have the better vision in unlit areas (e.g. parks, rooftops) than on lit city streets. The reason alleys in big cities are dark is not generally because there isn't enough light for you to see, but because of either glaring lights creating more contrast than your visual system can deal with, or else because you've left a really bright street and your eyes haven't had a chance to adapt.

In case you didn't see it already, check out the other amazing photo of clouds glowing over the Chicago skyline Ken sent me a few months ago.

How not to light a staircase

Staircases represent a tripping hazard, and it is therefore not unreasonable to illuminate them under certain circumstances. However, as I have shown in the past, poorly designed illumination is actually much worse than no illumination at all. A (literally) brilliant example of this comes from the "Lustgarten" park in Potsdam:

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

These lights combine both the wrong direction (shining horizontally rather than downward) with being extremely bright, which makes them terribly glaring, and makes it harder, rather than easier, to safely ascend the staircase. (Right after I took this photo, I misjudged the position of the first step and stumbled slightly, even though I was trying to shield my eyes from the glare).

What could be done instead? One interesting application I have seen is LEDs installed on the underside of a handrail. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of a really good execution of this. Here is an example of an attempt that didn't quite work out:

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

It's better than the example above, but is still a problem, because it's still too bright near the lamps. What pedestrians need is accent illumination that helps them separate the stairs from the surroundings. When you have most of the scene lit with ~0.1 lux from skyglow and other distant light sources, and you then put 50 lux directly under the handrail, you've now created a 500:1 contrast. Your visual system doesn't deal well with that level of contrast, and it makes it harder to see.

For areas that are not brightly lit, moonlight provides a good benchmark. A typical full moon night is around 0.1-0.2 lux, so if you're illuminating a fairly light concrete, you really shouldn't need any more than that.

Update (October 20, 2021)

I found a great example, also in Potsdam. Check out the lights at the front steps of the Ernst von Bermann Clinikum (hospital):

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

The photo doesn't do it justice. It's a beautiful installation, there is absolutely no glare, it's not too bright, the color is warm, and in real life the area between the stairs is also sufficiently illuminated by light from the surroundings. I hope I get a chance to return to these two locations with a luxmeter and a DSLR camera sometime soon to do a more proper comparison.