Last year, my kids and I participated in the Great Worldwide Star count. It was fun and educational for the kids to observe how many stars they were able to see from our yard and our observations helped the cause of Science!
This year’s star count is from October 20 – November 3. I’m planning on participating again and would highly recommend it to everyone. If you are interested, go here to find out more. It’s easy, takes only about a half an hour and benefits science. Your observations are put together with others in order to create more detailed light polution maps.
I’ll be posting more reminders as the event comes closer, but would encourage everyone to participate. It does not require a dark sky, telescope, binoculars, or knowledge of the night sky. All it requires is at least one good eye (with eyeglasses is fine), a little bit of time and the sky. Basically you go outside between 7-9pm wait a few minutes to let your eyes (or eye) adjust to the darkness, then look up and find cygnus (which is easy and they give you a chart), you figure out which of their 7 images looks most like what you see and then you record that online. If you’re able to do that on several different nights during that time, that’s great and even better if you can do it from several locations. Last year I posted several entries from Flintstone, Georgia but also posted an entry from downtown Chattanooga (really bad light polution). All of this data is combined to help create better light polution maps.
