Astroblog: 6th Globe at Night Campaign (Feb. 21

Monday, February 21, 2011

6th Globe at Night Campaign (Feb. 21 - March 6, 2011)

The evening sky around 10:00 pm daylight saving time in February in Australia.

It's now 6 years since the Globe at Night started surveying light pollution around the world. This year the survey is from 21 February to 6 March (starting tonight). Everyone can be involved, hopefully students and teachers too. Basically, an hour after sunset head out, look to the west to find Orion, then check how many stars are visible, and report your observations. It's a great excuse to get outdoors and look at the sky. You might even see the International Space Station or an Iridium flare or NanoSail-D.

This year you can submit your results a smart phone or tablet. To do this, you can use the web application at www.globeatnight.org/webapp/. Globe at Night is also on Facebook and Twitter.

There is a pod-cast on light pollution from 365 days of astronomy and a powerpoint presentation that explains about light pollution and how to do the sky survey, and special activities for kids. So go on, get out and have a go!

Labels: globe at night, light pollution

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 8:44 pm

Comments:

Hi Ian. It has been a while. I hope you and your family are doing well.

I spotted a link to one of your previous blog posts in a graphic on Information Is Beautiful. They have a post showing how they made their recent exoplanet graphic: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/book/process/executing-the-exos/

# posted by

Stuart : 10:16 am

Hi Stuart! Yeah, it's been a while. Family are fine (although eldest one is turning into an uncommunicative teenager), and Archie the Gallah is chewing everying in sight. Hows things with you? You seem to be hooping all around the place.

That infographic is beautiful/awesome! Thanks for the link!

Cheers! Ian

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 2:30 pm

All teenagers have to be like that at some point. It's the law ;-)

Late last year I took up a new job working for a global network of telescopes. It isn't a research job but I'm feeling much more useful. Plus, I'm getting to make some of the things I've previously had to do in my spare time.

Out of interest, with Blogger, are you able to include iframes or Javascript when writing a post? I'm trying to make my Virtual Sky embeddable http://lcogt.net/en/user/slowe/dev/virtualsky/embed/custom.html

I hope things are going well with your research.

# posted by

Stuart : 1:28 am

SNERK! (about teenager comment)

It's a shame about the research, but at least you have an astronomy job at a time when governments world-wide are rolling back science funding (sigh).

I've been meaning to blog some of the stuff you are doing, I liked the FITS display. I THINK you can embed stuff in blogger, I remember doing something with frames WAYYYBACK Oh, yeah you can.
http://www.google.com.au/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=388cac912698e839&hl=en

Research should be ramping up, but they want to move all the labs around which will mess up the timing.

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 10:19 am