VA-report 2020:3
In 2019 and early 2020, school pupils, teachers, scout groups, astronomers and interested members of the public in Sweden, Spain, the UK and Ireland went out to count stars in the night sky. The objective was to help researcher, Urban Eriksson, Lund University, to test a new method for measuring light pollution.The Star-Spotting Experiment was a citizen science project run as part of European Researchers’ Night activities in Sweden, Spain, Ireland and the UK, co-ordinated by the Swedish non-profit organisation VA (Public & Science). Over 1900 observations were recorded during the experiment across the four countries.
A comparison between the results from the Star-Spotting Experiment and those obtained in other similar studies that have studied light pollution from the ground, shows that the simple method used in Star-Spotting Experiment works well. This can be important for developing new, cheap, simple and reliable measurement methods in the future.
Download a PDF of the report here.
There is also an interactive map where you can zoom in and see exactly where in each of the four participating countries the various observations were made and how many stars were visible at each observation.
