Cool Sky Brightness Meter
I’ve just learned from Pamela Gay’s Blog about a cool new device designed to quantitatively measure the sky brightness.
It costs $119.00 and operates on a 9V battery. C’mon, you know you want one. I sure as hell do.
What do you get for your money? A number in visual magnitudes per square arcsecond.
Now, you may be thinking “big whup”, but I’m here to tell you this is a good thing. We need easy to make quantitative measurements of this kind of thing in order to fully study the effect light pollution has on our environment and our daily lives.
So far, people like the International Dark Sky Association and the Globe at Night Project have been using qualitative data, meaning estimates with our eyes, to determine how bright our night sky has become. This is OK so far as it goes, the eye is a good integrator, but the human brain is easily fooled and will make determinations on what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is.
A device like this takes the estimating and the tricks of our brain out if the equation and replaces it with a definitive number (so long as it’s calibrated properly).
For those of us who spend more waking hours at night than the day, it’s become quite depressing to see how bright the night sky has become. I’ve posted significantly on this on this blog and will continue to do so because people must be made to understand that we are losing the stars.
I for one, walk around my house in the dark all the time, I rarely turn on a light. I know that’s excessive but I’ve become quite accustomed to waking around without seeing and have become quite good at it. At the telescope, I rarely need to turn on a flashlight because I have a routine that allows me to get at and operate everything I need in the darkness.
These days, the sky has become so bright at night that I can actually see things without a flashlight anyway. A device like this could let me measure exactly how bright things have gotten and measure trends both by time and location.
I think I’ll pay the $119.00, for nightsky nerds like me, it’s money well spent. I’ll let you know how I like it after I get mine.
Photo Credit: unihedron.com
Technorati Tags: light pollution, sky brightness meter
Related Stories
POSTED IN: light pollution
0 opinions for Cool Sky Brightness Meter
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: