My Globe at Night Results
The time for reporting sky glow conditions for the Globe at Night project has elapsed. Fortunately, I was traveling around the state during this time so I was able to report observations for several areas.
During the two weeks or so the Globe at Night project was accepting results, I took measurements from Louisville, Boulder, Estes Park, Breckenridge and Colorado Springs. Here are the results:
- Louisville: Magnitude 3
- Boulder: Magnitude 3
- Estes Park: Magnitude 3
- Breckenridge: Magnitude 4
- Colorado Springs: Magnitude 3
To be fair, I took these all from populated areas, I didn’t go out into the country. Even though Estes Park and Breckenridge are up in the mountains, I stood in town to look up and make my estimates. Most places ended up looking just like my backyard.
I expected Estes Park, a mountain community, to have good, dark skies. I was a little disappointed about how the skies looked there. I’m sure where I chose to stand had something to do with that. I stood in the middle of the courtyard of the Stanley Hotel (where I was staying) to take my measurements. Here’s what it was like from that vantage point:
Image Credit: Me
They also had a lot of this crap in the courtyard:
Image Credit: Me again.
I’ve already ranted about what I think of these kind of lamps. This contributed greatly to the reduced number I recorded at Estes Park.
Breckenridge was much better, they were using low pressure sodium lamps with full-cutoff so the skies weren’t as bad there. Still, I took my estimate from the parking lot of the hotel I was staying at since that’s representative of the kind of place most people are when they look up.
When most people casually look up at the sky, they are usually doing so on the way to their car or in the grocery store parking lot. That’s the kind of behaviour I wanted to simulate when I took my estimates.
I hope all of you had a chance to participate and record your estimates for your locations. I hope to see more efforts like this in the future. I know I found it quite fun (and a bit depressing), and I was able to use the opportunity to teach something about light pollution to my kids.
Technorati Tags: GLOBE at Night, light pollution, stanley hotel
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