GLOBE at night
GLOBE at night
A picture that I took this evening of the Orion constellation during the GLOBE at night project.
This project has involved thousands of other students, families and citizen-scientists around the globe during March 2007 with results shared with a central online database.
In Australia we call Orion the flying saucepan. Here I am estimating the magnitude of stars that we can see with the naked eye to calculate the level of light pollution in the general atmosphere.
Although this picture is very heavily processed and includes many digital artifacts, I did this deliberately to enhance the red glow of the sky over Melbourne. I am about 30 km away and looking West towards the city.
In the country, away from Melbourne an an hour after sunset, we can easily see hundreds of stars in this constellation (magnitude . The few stars we can see here gives me a poor reading of just magnitude 4 or 5 level stars. It will be interesting to compare this with my students when we meet back together in class.
Too many buildings in Melbourne are illuminated with lights pointing upwards. Wasted light is wasted energy.