We invite advanced amateurs astronomers to collaborate with us to a scientific project which has the aim to collect a large number of measurements of sky brightness in the main astronomical photometrical bands together with extinction data. The project is part of scientific activities of the International Dark-Sky Association – Italian section and is already started in this country.

Many studies of light pollution and artificial sky brightness require large quantities of measurements of sky brightness that, in order to be useful, need to be associated to the knowledge of the atmospheric conditions during the measurements. The vertical extinction is one of the parameters most easy to measure which allow to evaluate the aerosol content of the atmosphere.

We propose to advanced amateur which can have at their disposal a CCD device mounted on a small telescope and one, or more, standard U, B, V, R filters to participate to our group of study making accurate measurements of sky brightness together with extinction in a large number of clean nights and, if their instruments are transportable, in many different sites. This will allows to obtain for each site the relation between atmospheric conditions and sky brightness. Measurements require registration of date, time, sky position in both celestial and altazimuthal coordinates. Could be useful if measurements will not be limited to zenith but will cover the intere emisphere with one of the common sampling scheme.

Few experienced people who already made this kind of measurements will be happy to discuss the techniques to use and the results with who is willing to collaborate, so that results will be obtained with the same technique by all observers. We would like to create small sub-groups, each one with an experienced person who can give support and suggestions to the others, and discuss with them.

We plan to publish results in a professional journal with a paper at which all active observers will take part as authors, if resulting measurements will have an adequate level and will be in a sufficiently large number.

For informations please contact Dr. Falchi falchi@lightpollution.it

Have a look at the observational protocol

Dr. Pierantonio Cinzano

Dipartimento di Astronomia -- Università di Padova – Italy

Dr. Fabio Falchi

Light Pollution in Italy Home Page