Can You See the Stars?
Join thousands of other students, families and citizen-scientists hunting for stars during February 25 through March 8, 2008. Take part in this international event called GLOBE at Night to observe the nighttime sky and learn more about light pollution around the world.
GLOBE at Night is an easy observation and reporting activity that takes approximately 15-30 minutes to complete. Citizen-scientists record the brightness of the night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with 1 of 7 stellar maps of different limiting magnitude. They then submit measurements on-line at www.globe.gov/globeatnight/. Resulting maps of all observations are created and placed back on-line by the GLOBE at Night staff within the few weeks that follow.
The five easy star-hunting steps, for which more information is provided on-line, are:
1) Find your latitude and longitude.
2) Find Orion by going outside an hour after sunset (about 7-10pm local time)
3) Match your nighttime sky to one of our magnitude charts.
4) Report your observation on our website. (Observations can be made February 25 through March 8; you may report through March 15).
5) Compare your observation to thousands around the world.
In addition to the unaided-eye observations of Orion, the GLOBE at Night campaign offers Sky Quality Meters (SQM) users the opportunity to measure directly the integrated sky brightness. SQM measurements by citizen-scientists can also be reported on the GLOBE at Night website to contribute to a global map of light pollution around the world.
Helpful and user-friendly ancillary materials such as a teacher packet and science standards, a family packet, and student games and information are provided on-line at www.globe.gov/globeatnight/.
You can also subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates and results of this campaign. Visit www.globe.gov/globeatnight/ and click on “subscribe” at the bottom of the webpage.
During the inaugural event in 2006 over 18,000 people from 96 countries submitted 4600 observations, including data from every U.S. state. In 2007, the number of observations almost doubled! Help us exceed 10,000 observations in 2008!
GLOBE at Night is a collaboration between the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (www.noao.edu), The GLOBE Program (www.globe.gov), The International Dark-Sky Association (www.darksky.org), Centro de Apoyo a la Didactica de la Astronomia (www.ctio.noao.edu/AURA/CADIAS/), and Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (www.esri.com/k-12). GLOBE schools all over the world as well as science and nature centers and astronomy clubs (i.e., programs with networks maintained by the Astronomical Society of the Pacifiic) are local leaders in GLOBE at Night efforts with citizen scientists.
The press release (and more information on SQMs) can be found at http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr08/pr0803.html.