The extent and brightness of #skyglow depends significantly on what happens near the ground. Read more about how the #weather influences the brightness of the nighttime #environment both in the sky and on the ground, and what it means for the ways we measure and monitor light pollution.
Our paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on current challenges in measuring night sky brightness (with a particular emphasis on polarization measurements) is now published.
"Due to the further projected increase in the brightness of the night sky, ... observers in small towns will experience changes in the quality of the sky over the coming years, which will undoubtedly make astronomical observations difficult."
Even though this article doesn’t address the question directly, just wondering aloud here: do ‘smart telescopes’ that use some form of AI enhancement undercut efforts to reduce light pollution? If (well-equipped) amateur astronomers can basically ‘defeat’ #skyglow this way, will they care at all about how much skyglow there is in any given location? https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202309.0997/v1
"Our study shows that in the absence of direct light pollution, anthropogenic changes in sky brightness relieve nightjars from visual constraints on being active. Individuals adapt daily activities to artificial night-sky brightness, allowing them more time to fly than conspecifics living under natural light cycles. This modification of the nocturnal timescape likely affects behavioural processes of most crepuscular and nocturnal species."
In this new paper with my colleagues Miro Kocifaj and František Kundracik (Comenius University, Slovakia), we demonstrate a method for estimating the aerosol optical depth and asymmetry parameter for #skyglow modeling on any given night using images of the daytime sky.