Project Overview
Dark Sky Preservation
Department(s)
Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
Irresponsible lighting at night is quickly eroding humanity's connection with the night sky. An international movement has grown out of a grass roots effort to recapture and preserve this connection by promoting more responsible lighting practices. The American Astronomical Society has created the Campus SHINE program to bring these efforts to college campuses in the United States to raise awareness of what is being lost and educate students and university administrators about ways to responsibly light college campuses. Prof. Jeff Bary is currently leading an initiative to both assess the lighting on Colgate's campus while also leading a major initiative to preserve and promote dark sky places in rural Appalachia. This project includes a collaboration with the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and several institutions in Virginia and North Carolina (U. of Virginia, Radford University, Appalachian State University, and University of North Carolina-Asheville to assess, improve, and protect the night skies above the 469-mile extent of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This project will engage the student in many aspects of this work including measuring sky brightnesses and performing a lighting inventory on campus, developing a website to both collect and share this work, installing a sky brightness meters at Foggy Bottom Observatory, and buidling a Campus SHINE program for Colgate's campus.
Student Qualifications
Website development and GIS experience would be excellent skills, but not required.
Number of Student Researchers
1 student
Project Length
6-8 weeks
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