One of KID’s newest members is Farhan Shah, a research trainee with a background in environmental engineering. His interest in light pollution and the environmental impact thereof compelled him to join the project.
He has extensive experience in programming and the particular data analysis required for the Keep it Dark research framework. Since September 2023, he has been dedicating his time to help make sense of all the acquired data from the SQMs from the washetdonker.nl network. This web of sky quality metres has been running from 2019 onwards, with new measurement locations joining the system from time to time. Today, there are more than 50 different associated stations, scattered all over the Netherlands and some parts of Germany, measuring the brightness of the night sky through SQMs. They do so basically every night, which brings in a lot of data.
Farhan’s goal is to find out whether the light pollution in a certain location is increasing, and by how much. In order to do this, he first focused on making the data easier to work with. He did so by removing the `unusable’ nights for every location. For us, these are nights where phenomena like the Sun, Moon, and the clouds - which can reflect light from below - are notably present, so that the night sky appears much brighter to us than without. Sunless, Moonless, and cloudless nights are easier to compare for various locations in terms of light pollution occurrence and evolution. A next step is to analyse correlations with other factors in the atmosphere, like temperature and humidity.
Besides, he is working on answering the question whether in the times of COVID, when there was less movement of people, light pollution was also less. It is also of interest to the project how well the SQM sensors hold up over time and if they are still in a condition as good as they were in when they were first installed. This is also something he will delve into, as well as calibration methods in the case the SQMs are not up to standard anymore.
Furthermore, Farhan aims to compare the SQM data to satellite data of the sky brightness. The data we gather on the ground with the SQMs is precise and accurate, but very local, whilst satellite data has a lot more uncertainties and errors accompanying it, but covers a much larger area. His ultimate goal is to try to figure out a way to calibrate the satellites with the ground data to help satellite data be better. He hopes to eventually write a research paper on his work at the end of the KID project.
Stay tuned for updates from Farhan and the other KID members.