Between June 27 and July 1, 2019, I had the opportunity of attending with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project a part of the fourth “Light Pollution Theory, Modelling, and Measurements” and a workshop connected to the conference. Here you will find a brief summary of the event and the experimental activities related to it, and some highlights (or should I say “high lights”) from the trip from Toscana to Hungary.

Also, please note your next opportunities to interact with BuioMetria Partecipativa and interdisciplinary night promotion and protection: July 16 in Milano, for an outreach event with Wim Schmidt, one of the main Dutch experts on this topic, and from July 25 to 29 in Southern Tuscany, with a visit by prof. Zoltán Kolláth, the mastermind of all the Hungarian events portrayed below, as well as a great progressive rock fan.

Now, back to the LPTMM conference (from June 25 to June 28). This is a bi-annual meeting attracting the main world experts in the field. After the main event, an experimental workshop was scheduled, inviting researchers to conduct night sky quality measurements with different techniques, spanning from the dear, old, Sky Quality Meter (which we called buiometro in Italy), to a plethora of imaging systems complemented by rather sophisticated processing workflows.

Such developments in sensing techniques also reflect the maturity on the light pollution monitoring topic. In the Nineties the focus of the experts was in the mitigation of light pollution effects in relation to night sky observation, as a priority mainly deriving from astronomers in order to reduce the amount of light improperly directed upwards. In the following years, with a greater awareness of the negative effects of the blue component of night lights, and its impact on ecology and landscape, measurement systems have evolved in order to detect such information. Essentially state-of-the-art technology requires the acquisition of “all sky” images, allowing to assess the source direction of lights, as well as spectral data. Combining such information, and integrating it with remote sensing data, as well as drone-derived information, extremely detailed scenarios can be assessed, thus supporting policies and management strategies for lighting systems.

The conference was in the Zselic dark sky park, in the South-West of Hungary. This is one of the three dark-sky areas certified by the International Dark Sky Association, and catered like babies by Zoltán Kolláth: in addition to managing the certification process, in the years the professor has fostered a series of lighting renovation projects in the villages around the “night sky reserves”, developed a structured research, and promotion activities on night sky-related issues.

A photo report of the “buiometric” mission and the LPTMM workshop (June 28/July 1 2019)

We thank the conference organizers for their hospitality, and grant EFOP- 3.6.2-16- 2017-00014, “Development of international research environment for light pollution studies” for support to this mission. For more information: bmp@pibinko.org

Header image: two globe luminaires silhouetted on the ancient walls of the village of Rab.

From June 14 to June 16 I was invited to give a presentation at the first Croatian conference on light pollution, in the stunning setting of the Rab Island, and namely in the area of Lopar. The event was triggered by the launch of a national law on light pollution, and the interest by various stakeholders to increase awareness on this topic. The invitation I had derived from various pre-existing contacts withing the BuioMetria Partecipativa project, the participation in 2013 to an international measurement campaign on the island of Lastovo, and other interconnections.

Concerning the talk on BuioMetria Partecipativa, I provided a summary of our experiences since 2008, and our point of view on some of the light pollution issues. Such viewpoint comes from the mediation of numerous contacts with a wide range of subjects active in different roles related to artificial light at night, and light pollution research, as well as an extensive track record of community engagement initiatives, including citizen science campaign, and outreach and education events.

Furthermore, in the presentation we proposed various potential lines of collaboration between Italy, Croatia, and other countries facing the Adriatic sea, also considering the fact that the effects of artificial lighting from Italy are in many cases well detectable from the Eastern coast of the Adriatic, as documented by measurement campaign which I was invited to attend in the past in the context of European projects.

With our presence at the Lopar conference (acknowledging the organizers for their hospitality), Buiometria Partecipativa, a small bottom-up project launched in 2008 in the Farma Valley, one of the lesser known parts of Tuscany, is maintaining its commitment to represent Italy in a European context, on a topic which many people consider a niche. A niche which, however, has every day less motivations to be neglected, given the increasing sensitivity to environmental issues, and the fact that even small actions count, and can be related to strategies on a much wider scale, and with an interdisciplinary approach (which the pibinko.org network is quite comfortable with, anyway)

More initiatives are taking shape summing up the BuioMetria Partecipativa team and the Metalliferous Hills Jug Band , and will be announced soon. The next scheduled “situation” will be Andrea Giacomelli the the third Meet Music, a national workshop on music production in Follonica, on June 25.

For more information: bmp@pibinko.org

Before and after the conference…

Reaching Lopar from Southern Tuscany is a long trip. Given the interesting opportunity of the invitation for a short event, I decided to embed a “survey” campaign on the way, adopting the map(pear)ing approach. For this I needed some starting information, which materialized in the form of a book with the presentation of over 100 musicians from all over the Balkan area (and ranging East to Caucasus), and at some point a map of the country.

The stops were in Trieste (Trst), Rijeka (once Fiume) and Rab (once Arbe). For those of you receiving frequent emails with invitations to go to Croatia for dental care, I can confirm that there are a lot of facilities of this type, at least in the city. I considered that once this area was confronted by irredentists, and now, things evolved and we can find dentists. But let’s give the floor to some shots: