GLOBE at Night 2010
You know Orion? Yes, that Orion the hunter who lies among the stars with its prominent three belt stars that is usually the only constellation a non-stargazer known of.
Constellation Orion is visible in the night sky now, and you can easily spot it as soon as the sky gets dark provided, of course, that the sky condition in your area allows you to see stars. So how bad is the light pollution in your area? Researchers want to know. They also want to explore the concept of light pollution and to research the patterns of light pollution across the globe.
Now, we all can help in this research in an annual 2-week campaign called GLOBE at Night. Between now and March 16, go out, look up, find Orion and compare what you see with the magnitude chart provided and then report your findings online.
Light pollution is one of our biggest stargazing enemies. They not only drown the stars and destroy our view of the night sky, but also wasted a lot of unnecessary energy. A lot of people never realise that, to them, lighting is just lighting, as long as they let people see in the dark, not many of us really realised (or don’t care) that sometime most of the light wasted in lighting up other things that do not required to be lighted, such as the night sky. Hopefully project like GLOBE at Night will help a lot of people realise that stars are missing from the night sky because of our irresponsible lightings.
The GLOBE at Night website have all the information you need to get started, so go out and tell the world how good (or bad) your night sky is!
My Dark Sky 