![]() Stellarium, a free planetarium software, lets you adjust the amount of light pollution in the settings. The “Clear Outside” smartphone app tells you your current Bortle scale class It also provides you with an estimated sky quality magnitude. This uses your current GPS location to present you with an accurate readout of where your night sky lands on the Bortle scale. In the example below, I can see that Cherry Springs State Park is a Class 2 on the Bortle scale.Īnother easy way to measure the sky brightness of my backyard and the dark sky sites I visit is using a smartphone app called Clear Outside by FLO. The free light pollution map tool lets you plot a specific point on the map for a Zenith sky brightness reading. I prefer to use online resources such as light pollution maps that will give you an approximate reading for any location on Earth. ![]() There are specialized tools available to measure sky brightness from a very localized area such as a sky quality meter. For example, a Class 1 Bortle sky means that one can observe M33 ( Triangulum Galaxy) as a direct-vision naked eye object. The Bortle scale uses astronomical observations to measure the amount of light pollution for a given location. This is an appropriate description of my night sky quality, as I live in the center of a medium-sized city (Population of 130,000). For example, my Class 8 backyard sky has the title of “City Sky”. Unfortunately for many backyard astrophotographers, their primary imaging location is much farther down the Bortle scale then they would like. ![]() There are nine levels to the Bortle scale with Class 9 being the most extreme amount of light pollution. The Bortle scale is a way of measuring the quality (brightness) of the night sky for a particular location. Aside from the opportunity to collect astrophotography images with improved signal, I am also able to see many more stars in the night sky from my backyard visually. I later moved from a house under Bortle Class 8 skies to a Class 6, which made a big difference in the amount of light pollution I observe from home. As discouraging as these readings may sound, it doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy astronomy (and astrophotography) in conditions like this. The sky quality at my home is a class 8 on the Bortle scale, which is the second brightest sky possible. I have personally battled with light pollution in my backyard when taking deep sky astrophotography images. There are a number of ways to measure how much light pollution affects a given location (SQM, NELM), but my personal favorite way to gauge the quality of a location is the Bortle scale. These colors represent the amount of artificial light in the area, and how bright the night sky will look.Ī light pollution map showing the location of my backyard One of the easiest ways to identify the brightness of your night sky is to use the Bortle scale.Ī light pollution map will show that a large city radiates white to red from the center, and rural areas will appear green to blue. To download the Android version of S&T SkyWeek, go to Market on the Droid menu screen and search for SkyWeek.You may have noticed that amateur astronomers and astrophotographers will often describe their sky quality reading when posting pictures or discussing observations. The app works on Android phones running Android version 2.1 or higher, which includes 95% of Android phones. With a "night mode" option, the app is ideally set up to be an on-site observing tool for astronomy enthusiasts. It allows users to zoom in and out on the skymap, set a location, pan around your local sky, and go to different times and dates. ![]() "We designed the app to be extremely user friendly," says Tim DeBenedictis, whose firm, Southern Stars, developed the app in partnership with Sky & Telescope. "It gives the user a day-by-day report on the week’s most exciting sky events with a link to an interactive sky chart that tells you when and where to look to see the event." "But it goes beyond that," says S&T editor in chief Robert Naeye. The app is based on the S&T website's popular This Week's Sky at a Glance bulletin, which presents editors' picks of the most exciting things to observe each night, from planetary conjunctions to eclipses to meteor showers. The splash screen for S&T SkyWeek for Android. ![]()
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