Related papers: Whitening the Sky: light pollution as a form of cu…
Light pollution is a form of environmental degradation in which excessive artificial outdoor lighting, such as street lamps, neon signs, and illuminated signboards, affects the natural environment and the ecosystem. Poorly designed outdoor…
Studies in Australian Indigenous astronomical knowledge reveal few accounts of the visible planets in the sky. However, what information we do have tells us that Aboriginal people were close observers of planets and their motions, noting…
There is a surging concern regarding the adverse effects of light pollution on human well-being. This manuscript aims to emphasise the deleterious effects of uncontrolled night-light exposure on the health and mood of individuals residing…
Nighttime photography is severely degraded by light pollution induced by pervasive artificial lighting in urban environments. After long-range scattering and spatial diffusion, unwanted artificial light overwhelms natural night luminance,…
Presence of dust in galaxies removes half or more of the stellar energy from the UV-optical budget of the Universe and has profound impact on our understanding of how galaxies evolve. Measures of opacity in local galaxies are reviewed…
Light pollution, a typically underrecognized environmental issue, has gained attention in recent years. While controlling light pollution requires sustained efforts, Earth Hour offers a unique natural experimental setting to assess…
Indigenous Australian practices, developed and honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we'll look at different aspects of First Australians' traditional life and uncover the…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…
The visual perception of the natural night sky in many places of the world is strongly disturbed by anthropogenic light. Part of this artificial light is scattered in the atmosphere and propagates towards the observer, adding to the natural…
The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
Modelling techniques for the propagation of light pollution in the atmosphere allow the computation of maps of artificial night sky brightness in any direction of the sky, involving a large number of details from satellite data. Cinzano et…
Could we enjoy starry skies in our cities again? Arguably yes. The actual number of visible stars will depend, among other factors, on the spatial density of the overall city light emissions. In this paper it is shown that reasonably dark…
The near infrared extinction powerlaw index ($\beta$) and its uncertainty is derived from three different techniques based on star counts, colour excess and a combination of them. We have applied these methods to 2MASS data to determine…
Unscrupulous outdoor lighting produces a number of effects that are currently included under the term light pollution. Its consequences (e.g. loss of resources by energy waste), are being recognized for some time, as well as the possibility…
Ground-based optical astronomy necessarily involves sensing the light of astronomical objects along with the contributions of many natural sources ranging from the Earth's atmosphere to cosmological light. In addition, astronomers have long…
The rising population of artificial satellites and associated debris in low-altitude orbits is increasing the overall brightness of the night sky, threatening ground-based astronomy as well as a diversity of stakeholders and ecosystems…
Interstellar exploration will advance human knowledge and culture in multiple ways. Scientifically, it will advance our understanding of the interstellar medium, stellar astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition,…
For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In this paper, we…
Technology has, without doubt, expanded our understanding of space. The Voyager 1 space probe is on the brink of leaving our solar system. Massive telescopes have discovered blasts of fast radio bursts from 10 billion light years away. And…
The growing number of satellite constellations in low Earth orbit (LEO) enhances global communications and Earth observation, and support of space commerce is a high priority of many governments. At the same time, the proliferation of…