Skyglow Totally Explained

Everything about Sky Glow totally explained

Skyglow (or sky glow), is a kind of light pollution, visible by the "glowing" effect seen in the skies over many cities and towns.
Skyglow often refers to man-made light, but the term also includes natural sources of diffuse nighttime light, such as the zodiacal light, light from faint stars, and natural air glow emitted high in the atmosphere.

Negative effects

Skyglow, and more generally light pollution, has many diverse negative effects, from aesthetic diminishment of the beauty of a star-filled sky, through energy and resources wasted in the production of excessive or uncontrolled lighting, to impacts on birds (see Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP)

) and other biological systems, including humans. Skyglow is a prime problem for astronomers, because it reduces contrast in the night sky to the extent where it may become impossible to see all but the brightest stars. It is a widely held misunderstanding that professional astronomical observatories can "filter out" certain wavelengths of light (such as that produced by low-pressure sodium) - it's more accurate to say that by leaving large portions of the spectrum relatively unpolluted, the narrow-spectrum emission from low-pressure sodium lamps allows more opportunity for astronomers to "work around" the resulting light pollution. Even when such lighting is widely used, skyglow still interferes with astronomical research as well as everyone's ability to see a natural star-filled sky.
Due to skyglow, people who live in or near urban areas see thousands fewer stars than in an unpolluted sky, and commonly can't see the Milky Way. Fainter sights like the Zodiacal light and the Andromeda Galaxy are nearly impossible to discern even with telescopes.

Causes

There are several causes of sky glow. These causes mainly differ in source. For example, public lighting provides a different form of light pollution than attention-grabbing strobe lamps, and these differ from commercial lighting installations. Light from electric lamps shines directly upward into the atmosphere from poorly shielded fixtures, and reflects from surfaces like the ground or streets into the sky. Some of this light is then scattered in the atmosphere by molecules and aerosols back toward the ground, causing skyglow.

Mechanism

There are two causes of the light scattering that lead to airglow: scattering from molecules such as N₂ and O₂ (called Rayleigh scattering), and that from aerosols, called Mie scattering. Rayleigh scattering is much stronger for short-wavelength (blue) light, while scattering from aerosols is little affected by wavelength. In most places, most particularly in urban areas, aerosol scattering dominates, due to the heavy aerosol loading caused by modern industrial processes and transportation. Rayleigh scattering makes the sky appear blue in the daytime; the more aerosols there are, the less blue or whiter the sky appears. When the air is clear and relatively free of aerosols, blue or white light (for example from metal halide lamps and fluorescent lamps) contributes significantly more to sky-glow than an equal amount of yellow light (for example from high- and low-pressure sodium vapor lamps). Another effect that makes skyglow from white light sources worse than from yellow arises from the Purkinje effect, where the eye becomes more sensitive to bluer/whiter light when adapted to low light levels, as experienced under night time conditions. A simple metric for first effect is the Rayleigh Scatter Index, discussed in a brief article and a 2003 presentation to both the International Dark-Sky Association Conference and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, which indicates that high pressure sodium sources produce roughly one-third to one-half of the skyglow compared to the output of typical metal halide sources, based on the same amount of light entering the atmosphere and pure Rayleigh scattering. When the Purkinje effect is also considered the effect is magnified, to where yellow sources can produce as little as one-eighth the skyglow of an equivalent output white light source, particularly when the observer is located at some distance from the light pollution source, the sky is darker, and the eye more completely dark adapted.

Measuring sky glow

Astronomers have used the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale to measure sky glow ever since it was published in Sky & Telescope magazine. The Bortle Scale rates the darkness of the sky, inhibited by sky glow, on a scale of one to nine, providing a detailed description of each position on the scale.

Further Information

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