All posts by pibinko

Thursday, July 25, 2019: The Night Sky, from the Hungarian Puszta to the Hills of Maremma (Terme Marine Leopoldo II, Marina di Grosseto, Tuscany)

Announcements

Thursday, July 25, at the Terme Marine Leopoldo II hotel in Marina di Grosseto (Tuscany) from 6.30PM to 8PM there will be a presentation of the mission by Zoltán Kolláth, astrophysics professor at the Savaria University Centre, Eötvös Loránd University, Szombathely, Hungary.

The professor, who is one of the leading authorities in the field of light pollution studies will be in Italy in the context of a collaboration with the BuioMetria Partecipativa, and will be visiting Southern Tuscany after four years (in 2015 he was part of a research team for a measurement campaign in the Farma Valley.

In the July 25 event you will have a chance to know more about the measurement activities which will be conducted in the following nights in various parts of Southern Tuscany -which in Italy is one of the few areas where a good night sky quality remains- and to understand how this characteristic, in addition to being an element of wonder, may become a territorial asset.

Citizens, businesses and public administrators can come to hear about professor Kollath’s experiences. In fifteen years, in Hungary he has been developing a whole sector of activity, spanning from scientific research, to environmental education, to dark sky park management, to actual lighting system renovation in order to procure lights which can couple energy efficiency and a strong compliance to state-of-the-art guidelines to minimize light pollution.

Last but not least, should you be interested in collaborating with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project, you will have a chance to know about the citizen science activities that this project is promoting since 2008, and through which you too can have an active role in the coming months.

For more details on the 2019 “buiometric” campaign, also see this post.

For more information, or to confirm your attendance, please write to bmp@pibinko.org or call +393317539228

Tue. Jul. 30, 2019: lecture on Atmospheric scattering and the view of the night sky by Zoltán Kolláth at Fondazione E. Mach, S. Michele all’Adige (Italy)

Announcements

The lecture will be a 2.30 PM

Measuring the quality of the night sky is necessary to assess light pollution and to evaluate its trends. These derive from a combination of existing and new lighting installations, and the applications of mitigation actions to reduce the amount of luminous flux escaping the primary areas where lighting is needed (and thus generating glare and skyglow), and containing increasing levels of blue light due to the diffusion of new generation lighting. Such measures are especially important in relation to protected areas, where night sky quality measurements by digital cameras have become a routine procedure. However, these observations lack the wavelength dependence of sky radiance; therefore, we have started a spectral sky quality survey parallel with the all-sky radiance measurements. To interpret the measurements, we also performed Monte Carlo simulations with the dominant light sources in the neighborhood of the measurement locations. We studied the effect of the tendencies of different atmospheric conditions for some reference cases with typical cloud and aerosol profiles.  The structure of the aerosol layers has a significant impact on the night sky radiance distribution, and it is neglected in most of the recent light pollution modelling. I will present our first results obtained at the Zselic Starry Sky Park, in the context of a now fifteen-year-old program for the protection and promotion of the night sky in various nature reserves in Hungary.

The visit to Fondazione Mach is part of a tour in Italy with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project, active since 2008 in the interdisciplinary protection and promotion of the night sky.

Zoltán Kolláth, professor of astrophysics at the Savaria University Center, Eötvös Loránd University, Szombathely, Hungary between 24 and 29 July. Prof. Kolláth is one of the highest international authorities in the field of light pollution studies, as well as in the promotion of the night sky as a resource. He was the creator of one of the first international star parks in Europe, the Zselic landscape protection area, and has for many years been a driving force in protecting night skies in Hungary, with the recognition of three parks certified by the International Dark Sky Association.

At the moment, the professor is responsible for a large national project for the development of scientific research on all aspects of light pollution, including the creation of new sustainable lighting systems. As an astrophysicist, he deals with the dynamics of pulsating stars. He is also very active in the dissemination in this sector, for example taking care of the soundtrack of astronomical signals that have been used in exhibitions and musical compositions, including a piece by John Legend.

A Photographic Version of the pibinko.org Network

Photos

Speaking to people about what we do, something we go for metaphors, sometimes for equations, sometimes for songs, or sometimes we just close our eyes and feel the breeze.

To provide yet another expression for the concept of “interdisciplinary protection and promotion of lesser known assets in the fields of culture, environment, and open innovation” I wrote a few lines of code displaying all of the photos published on this WordPress site in a row. This generates a sort of mosaic.

The result is a log which is partly in chronological order (for each event we do we have at least one photo on the site), and partly not, since we are also gradually importing to the site photos of things we did in pre-blog times (since 2000), which in the system are assigned the data of when the file is uploaded. In any case the effect is interesting, and some of you may recognise situations and folks.

To see the whole “movie” try: http://www.pibinko.org/scripts/listallimg.php . This will get you almost 1000 images (as of July 10, 2019), and will require some time to load, although the final effect is neat. Otherwise, you can try the month-by-month option:

January – February – March– April– May – June –

July – August – September – October – November – December

If some of the shots capture your curiosity, you can try and find the corresponding news on the blog, of write for more information.


The core of the images starts in 2015.

A First Comparison of Italian Regional Light Pollution Legislation

Announcements

In the May 16 conference which we organised in Brescia with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project in collaboration with the University’s DICATAM on Interdisciplinary promotion and protection of the night sky, we had a very interesting talk on Italian Regional legislation by Maria d’Amore. Maria has been following this topic for over ten years working at the Emilia-Romagna regional administration, and among other topics she presented a table which we then invited her to share.

The table shows similarities and differences, with respect to various criteria, region by region (for those regions where light pollution regulations are present). This table is an extremely interesting reference both for experts, and for non-experts who may have an idea of how different administrations have been approaching the same topic in the course of time.Regions are listed according to a reverse chronological order related to the year of publication of the most recent law.

The table is updated to June 2019 and is currently maintained in Italian (we may consider translating the table if there are specific requests). For comments or for more information, please write to: bmp@pibinko.org

The CLIWOC database

Announcements

As a background this calls for the “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills e Nash

On the line of promoting lesser known resources in the field of culture, environment, and open innovation, I recently recovered the complete database of the CLIWOC (Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850) project. This was a European-funded project between 2000 and 2003 with the aim of digitizing the logs of ships from some European countries over a period of 100 years, so as to extreact weather observations, which needed to be recorded daily. Data are mostly from Spagna, Great Britain and Holland (with some data from France, Sweden, etc.).

Apart from the climatologic aspects, this exercise interested me because of the spatial analysis implications, and having finally accessed the full database, the annotations which can be found.

Here you see some basic visualizations (each dot is one day from a given ship, with additional data attached to it). Geopolitical analysts will be on the loose on this. During the Summer we will show you more of what’s in the CLIWOC trove.

Spagna
Olanda
Inghilterra