Light pollution in Lazio: A measure by high-school students

Abstract

Light pollution is one of the most evident, though overlooked, source of environment pollution characterizing the industrial and post-industrial society. It is  due to a bad illumination of the towns and results from two main reasons:a) a deep ignorance, at a general level, of how the vision process works;b) a built-in fear of darkenss, so that the amount of emitted light is believed to be by itself  good.The net result of these facts is an ever increasing consumption of electric power which is used to badly illuminate our streets, buildings, and the sky over them.To increase the awareness of the light pollution, in the International Year of Astronomy, we made a didactic project involving some 15 High Schools in The Lazio Region: the students made naked-eye observations of the faintest star visible from their house in selected Constellations and put their data in a common database using a dedicated web site. Finally a map of the stars visibility was drawn and compared with a similar map derived from DMSP satellite data.