Wednesday, April 18, 2018

How dark are your skies?

How dark is your night sky? How well can you see the stars? The International Dark-Sky Association would like to know.

From the IDA Facebook page

The image above shows a representation of the Bortle scale, which provides a standard reference that allows the sky to be compared between different locations. See here for a detailed flowchart of how to use it. From just eyeballing the chart, I would say that Nanticoke is about a 6 on a good day - we get some light pollution from Wilkes-Barre to the East, the Crestwood Industrial Park in Mountaintop to the South, and the State Correctional Institute at Dallas to the North, as well as local pollution from unshielded streetlights and other randomly-directed lights.

Submit your assessment of the darkness of your sky to this post (post removed) on the IDA's Facebook page. And be sure to visit their website.


No comments: