Can we illuminate our cities and (still) see the stars?
arXiv:2109.05310 · doi:10.26607/ijsl.v23i2.113
Abstract
Could we enjoy starry skies in our cities again? Arguably yes. The actual number of visible stars will depend, among other factors, on the spatial density of the overall city light emissions. In this paper it is shown that reasonably dark skies could be achieved in urban settings, even at the center of large metropolitan areas, if the light emissions are kept within admissible levels and direct glare from the light sources is avoided. These results may support the adoption of science-informed, democratic public decisions on the use of light in our municipalities, with the goal of recovering the possibility of contemplating the night sky everywhere in our planet.
Twelve pages, five figures. Paper published in International Journal of Sustainable Lighting (2021)
References in corpus (12)
- The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness
- Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges
- The proliferation of space objects is a rapidly increasing source of artificial night sky brightness
- Human Contrast Threshold and Astronomical Visibility
- A multi-band map of the natural night sky brightness including Gaia and Hipparcos integrated starlight
- Magnitude to luminance conversions and visual brightness of the night sky
- Monitoring transition: expected night sky brightness trends in different photometric bands
- Protecting the night sky darkness in astronomical observatories: a linear systems approach
- Synthetic RGB photometry of bright stars: definition of the standard photometric system and UCM library of spectrophotometric spectra
- Restoring the night sky darkness at Observatorio del Teide: First application of the model Illumina version 2
- PSFs for mapping artificial night sky luminance over large territories
- Toward an atlas of the number of visible stars