Joel Stebbins and Light Pollution

Other

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

Scientific paper

Joel Stebbins (1878 - 1966), Director of the Washburn Observatory of the University of Wisconsin, pioneered the use of photocells for astronomical brightness measurements. He seems to have been the first to use photocells to measure night sky brightnesses. He was a Research Associate of the Mount Wilson Observatory. During a visit to Pasadena in the winter of 1931-32 he measured the night sky brightness with a portable photometer on Palomar Mountain and at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The latter had begun to be affected by light pollution even at that early date. He does not seem to have published his results in detail, but reported them in a letter that he sent on 1932 October 5 to John A. Anderson, the Executive Officer of the Palomar Observatory Council. Donald Osterbrock recently found a copy of the letter in the Washburn Observatory archives, and kindly communicated the details to me for analysis. Stebbins' most important result was that the night sky near the North Pole at Mount Wilson was 0.38 magnitude brighter than the night sky at Palomar. He also stated that in the evening at Mount Wilson the sky at altitude 10 deg over Pasadena and Los Angeles could be as much as 5 times as bright as at the Pole. I have used my light pollution model to analyze these and other results of Stebbins. I estimate that the light emission of the cities in 1932 was about 220 lumens per capita. Using this emission I calculated the Mount Wilson sky brightness at 10 deg altitude over Pasadena and Los Angeles as about 5.4 times the brightness at the Pole, in excellent agreement with Stebbins. This light emission may be compared with 1000 lumens per capita that my earlier analyses indicated for 1970.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

Joel Stebbins and Light Pollution does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Joel Stebbins and Light Pollution, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Joel Stebbins and Light Pollution will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1718951

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.