Citizen Science Project

For my citizen science project I will be helping to organize and collect data to measure the amount of light pollution that has been seen and growing throughout the years leading to “loss of the night”. No longer are you able to see stars in the sky like you were to hundreds of years ago but rather you are just able to see artificial lights that have, over time, intensified. For this project, I will be collecting visual data as well as computer/phone data. Through an app provided by the starters of the project, I will be taking photos of the sky, particularly at a certain stars to see how much of the night sky has been polluted with lamp designs. Through the data collection, I would be able to pay attention only to certain organisms, phenomena, and data because of the fact that these would be the main factors

that the stars are disappearing at night and our nights are getting brighter, rather than darker.

I wouldn’t say that there is an objective perspective you would have to take as you collect the data, however, being that this project does have to do with the idea that light is polluting the dark; the majority population would agree that artificial light is affecting the night sky. However, data can be biased by perspective because a citizen scientist can go to a place that is relatively lighter and brighter to take pictures of skies that show little to no star, rather than an area that isn’t as bright just to prove that artificial light pollution is serious and growing.

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The main scientist that had started this project was Franz Holker because of the fact that light pollution wasn’t only taking the night away from the Earth, as well as its stars but was also wasting a lot of money as well as energy resources. Not only does it hurt human resources and health but also hurts the Earth’s environments as well as threatens wildlife. I think their motivations were for the love of the Earth and its night sky. Everyone loves to go out and star gaze every now and then but especially in today’s society;

stargazing can most the time only be done in areas with little to no light such as the mountains. Although I am not too sure if this project is affiliated with other projects, there are many different partnerships that they have with different research organizations such as IGB Berlin, IZW Berlin, IFADO Dortmund, and many more. Thankfully, despite volunteers not being paid, this project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as well as the Berlin Senator for Economics, Technology and Research. This project directs funds and resources other environmental issues and no other ones because of the fact that it is talking mostly about the use of electricity in light rather than any other environmental issues. It is important to think about this because by focusing more on one environmental issue than many other different ones, scientists can focus and spend more time on fixing that one problem. By pinpointing and fixing one environmental issue first, then we are able to slowly narrow down the environmental issues rather than trying to solve everything at once which would progress in a slow change rather than a progressive change. I feel as though, however, this project needs the knowledge of every person, scientist or regular citizen because of the fact that we as citizens know where most of the artificial light is coming from and which areas have more whereas scientists know how to reduce the amount of artificial light and the negative causes it has upon the Earth.
For this project, once I would turn in the data, scientists and researches would use the measurements from the app to hope to learn how lamp contributes to light pollution. Not only scientists but also astronomers and lighting engineers approach the problem from their own perspective. This project can cause debates about many different types of subjects because of the fact that it can be linked to many issues such as light pollution, hazards to humans and animals, air pollution and many other different issues.