New project puts open data back into the hands of citizens
As streetlights the world over change from sodium lamps to LED, scientists wonder what this will mean for the artificial skyglow over cities. Because not every city lights the same way, the best way to understand whether skies worldwide are getting brighter or darker is to study the observations of citizen scientists. The new project "Myskyatnight", led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), invites interested people from all over the world to examine changes in their night sky. The goal is not only for the participants to collect data. Instead, the new web-based platform makes all data available to the public, and offers tools to visualize and analyze the measurements.