Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21715810w&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #158.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
GLOBE at Night is an annual international citizen-science event encouraging everyone to measure local levels of light pollution in February and March and contribute their observations online to a world map. (See www.globeatnight.org.) The campaign is hosted by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in partnership with ESRI. In the last three years citizen-scientists from around the world contributed more than 50,000 observations, with nearly 18,000 data points from the 2010 campaign. During the same time, millions of touch-based, GPS-enabled smartphones and tablets have been sold worldwide.
Each year NOAO staff has to discard data points due to inaccurate reporting of the location (latitude and longitude). Despite the use of innovative mapping tools on the data reporting web page, it is too easy to mistype numbers or forget a negative sign, spuriously relocating data points. Additionally, there is a time lag between when the data is collected at night and when it is reported later that can allow for additional error.
One approach to address these problems would be to create a way to submit the data when it is observed and have a more automated GPS capability for reporting an accurate location. The rise in popularity of GPS-enabled mobile devices provides such a solution. These phones include state-of-the-art browsers that have access to the GPS and other data (date, time). These devices can potentially be used to show an appropriate magnitude/sky chart to the citizen-scientist and submit the data in real time, as the observation is made.
NOAO staff is building a web application for mobile devices that will help realize these possibilities and potentially enable the accurate reporting of many more observations this year. Our poster will discuss this effort and describe what we hope to accomplish.
Newhouse M.
Walker Constance E.
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