Jesús Gallego ha puesto como ejemplo de buenas prácticas al Ayuntamiento de Madrid, que “se deja aconsejar muy bien y ha modificado mucho su iluminación nocturna durante los últimos años”. De acuerdo con el conferenciante, en Madrid se ha conseguido regular la intensidad lumínica a una hora avanzada de la noche y también se ha logrado que los comercios apagan sus luces.

Eso no quita para que el hongo de luz de la capital llegue hasta a 500 kilómetros de la Puerta del Sol, motivado el gran tamaño de la ciudad y por algunas iluminaciones exageradas como la de la Torre Picasso que lanza al cielo un chorro de luz que interfiere, por ejemplo, con las observaciones del telescopio de la Facultad de Físicas de la UCM.

De acuerdo con Jesús Gallego, tenemos el deber de preservar el cielo oscuro, para nosotros y para las generaciones futuras, con la mira puesta en descontaminar lo máximo posible los cielos que ya están contaminados por luz artificial. Una luz que afecta a los ritmos circadianos de todos los seres vivos del planeta y que perjudica a la calidad de sueño y a la producción de hormonas.

Ha recordado el complutense que la contaminación lumínica no sólo afecta a la astronomía, sino que también tiene efectos sobre la fauna, desde los polinizadores, que reducen su actividad, hasta el resto de insectos, aves e incluso mamíferos. Frente a eso se puede optar por buenas prácticas como la reducción de fuentes, que además estén bien apuntadas, hacia el suelo, que es donde se necesita que iluminen; sensores de encendido según se pase por debajo de las luces; menos luces blancas; oficinas apagadas por la noche, cuando no se usan, y faros de los coches que no sean deslumbrantes.

Jesús Gallego ha explicado que los ciudadanos pueden ayudar, no sólo con sus propias actividades relacionadas con la iluminación de sus viviendas y negocios, sino también participando en proyectos de ciencia ciudadana como Cities at Night. Los colaboradores con esta web reciben imágenes de diferentes lugares del planeta, para que los identifiquen, y hasta la fecha ya cuenta con 130.000 voluntarios que han identificado miles de imágenes tomadas por los astronautas desde la estación espacial, aunque quedan todavía unas 36.000 por localizar.

Otra opción es descargarse la app Street Spectra, que convierte en el móvil en un dispositivo científico para conocer qué tipo de farolas se utilizan en los diferentes lugares del mundo por los que paseamos. Esa app, que surge de un proyecto liderado por la UCM, sube toda esa información y la compara, gracias a la IA, con una base de datos con otras miles de fuentes.

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As this field expands it has started showing that it can be integrated into education in both formal and informal learning environments. In particular, the integration into education systems is creating new synergies as students acquire not only the skills necessary for participating in the project, but also a deeper understanding of the scientific method.

In terms of productivity, we have detected a few factors directly impacting the performance of the students in an environment with clear learning objectives while collaborating in the Street Spectra project.

1) Age. Although 12-year-old students are perfectly able to perform the tasks they usually need assistance to sing in and frequently forget their passwords.

16-year-olds and older have shown more engagement and take up to 6 times more pictures than younger students.

2) Phone. Most schools have rules against allowing the students using their own phone at class. Some of them leave it at home, so it is not a distraction.

This makes it very important to explain the needs to the teachers so they can inform the parents that phones will be needed. In some cases, students don’t have a phone at all. For them, the phone can be replaced by a computer if the school has some. A group of students using mixed systems works fine.

3) Internet access. Most students own a cell phone, but the youngest usually lack a data plan. Schools usually do not provide WIFI to their students, so sharing your own Internet with them. Internet access can make a difference in some places.

4) Motivation. Students are best motivated by their own teachers. How does the project relate to the subject they are studying? Finding a connection and mentioning it during the talk will not only stimulate the students, but the teachers. An encouraging teacher will help the students during the hands on and even offer some extra points to the students that take the project seriously.

5) Making a good presentation. The most important part of the activity is the initial introductory talk. We tried to make our own interesting, easy to understand and full of appealing pictures.6) Virtual classroom. The virtual classroom is the perfect place to share some homework with the students. Repeating the basic instructions and being specific about how much work is expected from them is the key. Students perform better if they are trying to reach a specific number of pictures or classifications.

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The cameras of our collaborators monitor the night sky to serve our main research purpose: to study the light pollution evolution by measuring the brightness and color of the night skies. However, from time to time, we get interesting and interesting by-products. 

This is the case of fenomena such as meteoroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere leaving a bright trail technically called meteor and fondly called “shooting stars”

When the meteor detection systems captures one in video we check the AZOTEA database looking for pictures of the event. 

Meteoroids are relatively small objects traveling through space, between the size of a grain of dust and a small asteroid.

When a meteoroid is big enough some pieces of it can survive their passage throught the atmosphere and lands on the surface becoming meteorites. 

Multiple camera views of the meteor’s luminous track allows the trajectory of the meteor through the atmosphere being calculated by triangulation what eventually can lead to find and collect the rocks themselves. 

Finally, our cameras have been able to picture noctilucent clouds also called night shining clouds. These made of ice crystals clouds are extremely rare and very high clouds that are visible in the night sky, usually on clear, summer nights during the astronomical twilight.

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They gave us the opportunity of reaching all the students from ages 12 to 18. Each group got two different sessions so they would learn the basics about light pollution and try the experience of becoming a scientist by both gathering data and analyzing it.

High pressure sodium, mercury vapor, metal halide or LED? The scholars learnt to identify the most common technologies of the streetlamps and used their phones or computers from the school to join Zooniverse and classify pictures taken by other students.

They were also given the opportunity to download Epicollect5 on their phones and the task to use a diffraction grating to take pictures of streetlamps around their homes and add them to the database. 
The information needed to participate is accessible from Street Spectra schools website and the results are visible on a map of the zone.

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The AZOTEA project and some information about the data obtained was presented during the eALAN conference 2021 that took place in june 15-17th. This symposium, known for gathering researchers working in Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) among whom some ACTION partners were included. 

Getting measures along the time to detect variations in the night sky brightness can be used as a tool to detect changes in light pollution. Specially interesting measurements would be the ones taken during and post COVID-19 lockdown. One of a kind situation that motivated the launch of the AZOTEA project.

Let’s browse a couple of figures to get a general view of the results. The first one shows an array of measurements taken from inside Madrid city. Each color represents a channel of the RGB sensor of the camera. The graph shows color coded data points corresponding to the sky brightness. The diagram shows the date along the x-axis and the time of the night along the y-axis. The fish shape is due to nights being shorter in summer than in winter.  The figure is also an example of the great pro-am teamwork. This series has been gathered by Jaime Izquierdo, an AZOTEA collaborator that observes almost every night.

The second and last one shows monthly averages of the sky brightness in each channel for Madrid observations. This kind of diagram helps scientists to detect changes in light pollution. A long time series is needed to remove all the effects not related to artificial light such as clouds and aerosols brightening the night sky in urban polluted areas.

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This year’s edition took place from September the 9th to the 13th, and for the first time, it happened not only in Linz, but at 120 locations around the globe.

6 ACTION projects were presented dealing with waste as well as air, noise and light pollution. We would like to share one of them prepared as a documentary like video presenting Street Spectra.

Street Spectra is a citizen science project to map and characterise public lighting sources in which volunteers use a low cost diffraction grating on top of their smartphones’ camera to take pictures of the street lamps and their emission spectra. 

The video included a brief introduction to why we are interested in identifying luminaires, an explanation of how to get and use a diffraction grating and tutorial on how to participate in the project.

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We would like to invite school students to contribute to one particular project. We intend to generate awareness about the problem of light pollution in general, and the consequences of the global switch out of the older street lighting to new LEDs usually richer in blue-rich white light emission, in particular. 

To help this objective, we have developed some learning materials for students with ages around 14 years old. The text discusses artificial light at night effects, review some different types of light pollution, study some of their negative effects and helps to understand how to install lighting sources in such a way that the negative impact is minimized.

Aside from gaining awareness, the students will be introduced to the Street Spectra citizen science project through which they will learn how to analyze and classify sources of light pollution contributing to science as a citizen scientist.

With the following link you can download the teaching materials. We hope you like them!

10.5281/zenodo.3941646

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Artificial night light passes through the atmosphere, interacting with air particles deflecting in all directions, generating a luminous halo in the sky, that now we know, can be seen from the ground as sky brightness and from the space as halo of diffuse light. To detect this halo, scientists from the Complutense University of Madrid in collaboration with the University of Exeter have combined 24 months (spread over 6 years) of data from the SNPP/VIIRS-DNB satellite in a single image.

HDR image used by the researchers in which the halo produced by the artificial night light in Madrid is observed. Credit: Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel /ESA / NASA

Thanks to these results, scientists have developed a new application, still in beta, from which the value of sky brightness and its evolution can be consulted anywhere outside of urbanized areas. It is a map with direct measurements and not data produced by a theoretical model like those that existed until now.

The results of this project are good news for all researchers studying the effects of artificial night light, since they will not only be able to use the halo data to better delineate cities, but they will also save thousands of travel kilometers to take measures as they have been doing until now.

Capture of the new application. To carry out this study, 6,753 kilometers of measurements were used throughout the community of Madrid. Credit: Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel et al. / NASA / ESA

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The lockdown is an exceptional opportunity to measure the effects of the decrease in human activity on the night sky. 

Professor Jaime Zamorano proposes a new citizen science project to monitor night sky brightness and color with photographic cameras, to assess the decrease in light pollution that isolation is expected to produce.

The project is aimed to anyone with a DSLR camera that takes photographs in RAW format. Ideally the camera should be installed aiming the zenith and conveniently protected on the volunteers’ roofs or terraces so it can take a picture every 6 – 12 minutes along the night. 

AZOTEA’s website includes the manual, a list of the collaborators that are already taking pictures of the night sky from home,  installation example pictures and configuration tips. 

Zamorano’s team includes several researchers that are already working on everything necessary to develop the project, such as Salvador Bará, Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, Jesús Gallego, Rafael González, Sergio Pascual, Jaime Izquierdo, Nicolás Cardiel, Carlos Tapia, Francisco Ocaña, Cristóbal García, Esteban González and Lucía García.

AZOTEA is a Universidad Complutense de Madrid project in collaboration with ACTION European Project, STARS4ALL Foundation, Red Española de Estudios sobre Contaminación Lumínica (REECL), Federación de Asociaciones Astronómicas de España (FAAE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Sociedad Española de Astronomía (SEA)

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Astronomy is possibly the science in which non-“scientific” personnel contribute more to the advancement of knowledge.

Amateur astronomers continue to discover comets and asteroids, refine the orbits of double stars, detect new features in the dynamic atmospheres of giant planets, characterize the variability in the brightness of stars.

They also actively contribute to determine the activity of meteor showers and racing paths, study stellar populations of open clusters using photometry, discover tidal tails and other interaction features in nearby galaxies, and are even already daring to observe transits of exoplanets and obtain spectra of planets, stars, supernovae and galaxies.

Download the StreetSpectra poster in HR

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