18 research outputs found
Imaging and mapping the impact of clouds on skyglow with all-sky photometry
Artificial skyglow is constantly growing on a global scale, with potential
ecological consequences ranging up to affecting biodiversity. To understand
these consequences, worldwide mapping of skyglow for all weather conditions is
urgently required. In particular, the amplification of skyglow by clouds needs
to be studied, as clouds can extend the reach of skyglow into remote areas not
affected by light pollution on clear nights. Here we use commercial digital
single lens reflex cameras with fisheye lenses for all-sky photometry. We track
the reach of skyglow from a peri-urban into a remote area on a clear and a
partly cloudy night by performing transects from the Spanish town of Balaguer
towards Montsec Astronomical Park. From one single all-sky image, we extract
zenith luminance, horizontal and scalar illuminance. While zenith luminance
reaches near-natural levels at 5km distance from the town on the clear night,
similar levels are only reached at 27km on the partly cloudy night. Our results
show the dramatic increase of the reach of skyglow even for moderate cloud
coverage at this site. The powerful and easy-to-use method promises to be
widely applicable for studies of ecological light pollution on a global scale
also by non-specialists in photometry.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure
Intercomparisons of Nine Sky Brightness Detectors
Nine Sky Quality Meters (SQMs) have been intercompared during a night time measurement campaign held in the Netherlands in April 2011. Since then the nine SQMs have been distributed across the Netherlands and form the Dutch network for monitoring night sky brightness. The goal of the intercomparison was to infer mutual calibration factors and obtain insight into the variability of the SQMs under different meteorological situations. An ensemble average is built from the individual measurements and used as a reference to infer the mutual calibration factors. Data required additional synchronization prior to the calibration determination, because the effect of moving clouds combined with small misalignments emerges as time jitter in the measurements. Initial scatter of the individual instruments lies between ±14%. Individual night time sums range from â16% to +20%. Intercalibration reduces this to 0.5%, and â7% to +9%, respectively. During the campaign the smallest luminance measured was 0.657 ± 0.003 mcd/m2 on 12 April, and the largest value was 5.94 ± 0.03 mcd/m2 on 2 April. During both occurrences interfering circumstances like snow cover or moonlight were absent
Worldwide variations in artificial skyglow
Despite constituting a widespread and significant environmental change,
understanding of artificial nighttime skyglow is extremely limited. Until now,
published monitoring studies have been local or regional in scope, and
typically of short duration. In this first major international compilation of
monitoring data we answer several key questions about skyglow properties.
Skyglow is observed to vary over four orders of magnitude, a range hundreds of
times larger than was the case before artificial light. Nearly all of the
study sites were polluted by artificial light. A non-linear relationship is
observed between the sky brightness on clear and overcast nights, with a
change in behavior near the rural to urban landuse transition. Overcast skies
ranged from a third darker to almost 18 times brighter than clear. Clear sky
radiances estimated by the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness were
found to be overestimated by ~25%; our dataset will play an important role in
the calibration and ground truthing of future skyglow models. Most of the
brightly lit sites darkened as the night progressed, typically by ~5% per
hour. The great variation in skyglow radiance observed from site-to-site and
with changing meteorological conditions underlines the need for a long-term
international monitoring program
Biological Earth observation with animal sensors
Space-based tracking technology using low-cost miniature tags is now delivering data on fine-scale animal movement at near-global scale. Linked with remotely sensed environmental data, this offers a biological lens on habitat integrity and connectivity for conservation and human health; a global network of animal sentinels of environmen-tal change
Position control of a rolling ball on a gimbal supported plate
Traineeship report
Tech United Eindhoven RoboCup adult size humanoid team description 2013
This document presents the 2013 Tech United Eindhoven adult size humanoid robot team from the Netherlands. In this description paper we present the model, parameter estimation and simulator of our humanoid robot TUlip. We introduce the walking gait and contribute a feedback controller with feedforward dynamics compensation and iterative learning control. We describe the vision system, localizatio