Current Projects involving members of the Working Group.

• Extension of map of artificial sky brightness at sea level in Chile to include altitudes. For background, click here (Pierantonio Cinzano).  An extensive oral and poster presentation on this work was a highlight of the Working Group meeting in Manchester .  This work was highlighted in an article in "The Economist".  Prominence was given to Pierantonio Cinzano's World Atlas at our Working Group meeting in La Serena, Chile in March, 2002 (see also powerpoint presentation - 82MB, slow download) . 

• Support the Office for the Protection of the Quality of the Sky (OPCC) for the II, III and IVth regions of Chile and long-range projects in other countries.  The OPCC is a joint project between AURA, ESO, CARSO and CONAMA (the Chilean National Environment Commission). Sr. Pedro Sanhueza (psanhueza@opcc.cl) is the first (and highly energetic) director and has already been awarded an IDA prize for his work in Chile.  This office was featured on the front page of the IDA newsletter for September, 2000. During its first year, in addition to general education of the population and the authorities concerning the new national norm for control of light pollution (the "norma luminica", the OPCC was tasked with making pragmatic improvements to at least one significant lighting project in each of the IInd (Paranal), IIIrd (Las Campanas) and IVth regions (La Silla, Tololo and Pachon) of Chile.  A first example is the successful rescue of a major municipal lighting project in the IVth region with direct line of sight to the Gemini South 8m telescope.  The 93m-high "Cruz del Tercer Milenio" is now lit following the direct technical guidance of working-group member Enrique Piraino, who has won an IDA lighting award for this work.  In the IIIrd region, Enrique Piraino was the keynote speaker at the "1st National Seminar on Lighting and Light Pollution" held in Copiapo in May, 2001.  A new Chilean lighting design company, Faelec, launched four types of quality-lighting fixtures at this Seminar. Some 7000 Faelec full-cutoff HPS luminaires have been installed in the city.   Educational outreach efforts by the OPCC in the IInd region, along with work with local mining interests have also begun in the area around Cerro Paranal, site of the VLT and several other major telescopes.  The city of Calama led the way, changing 3,000 street luminaires following a call for bids which included - for the first time in Chile - specified illumination levels.  By May, 2004, 1/3 of the luminaires in these three critical regions had been changed to downward-directed lighting, compliant with Chile's Presidential Decree 686, the "Norma Luminica" (which requires 100% compliance by October 1st, 2005). The changeover at Monte Patria (near the Gemini South and SOAR telescopes) was featured and illustrated in an article in the June issue of "Physics Today".  Throughout 2005, the OPCC has been working with the Chilean government's "Energy Efficiency Program" on ways to extend the "norma luminica" to the rest of the country - in a gentler form than is applied to the astronomically-sensitive regions but upgrading the attention paid everywhere to levels of energy consumption used in lighting. (This will benefit astronomy through reduction of upwardly reflected light).  Our working group is working with the IDA, the OPCC and CONAMA on a long-range initiative to try to involve other environment agencies - in countries such as the USA (the Environmental Protection Agency) and England (the Environment Agency) - in activities associated with the control of light pollution (Malcolm Smith).  Nigel Pollard's efforts in the UK have led to activity in the deputy prime minister's office and inclusion of light pollution in a 2005 Royal Commission report listing factors affecting the quality of the urban environment.  Nigel had earlier produced a UK government report "Lighting in the Countryside - Towards Good Practice:".  Ivan Dutil is leading an effort in Canada to protect a 50km-radius area around Mont Megantic observatory involving 32 local municipalities - as a beginning towards reducing the CDN$450,000,000 that Quebec sends skywards each decade.
  

• Education projects.  Further information is being prepared by Margarita Metaxa and John Percy, and by the Redlaser group in Chile.   The IDA held an educational workshop in Tucson in April, 2000, and participated in several meetings on education at the IAU General Assembly in Manchester - so watch their website.  We are also in the process now of contacting groups in California (Hands on Universe), Texas (MacDonald Observatory) and Arizona (NOAO outreach) as well as the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for more material.  We will be interested to hear from other countries.  There was an oral and poster presentation on light pollution at the IAU Teachers' Workshop in Manchester and at our WG meetings in Manchester.  Margarita and John are members of the Scientific Organizing Committe for the IAU Special Session 4 "Effective Teaching and Learning of Astronomy" at the Sydney General Assembly of the IAU (John is chairman).

    In November, 2000, people from all over Europe took part in the continent's biggest educational and cultural event on the web - the "netd@ys project".  This program is now in its fifth year; every year the number of visits to the site increases substantially.  Both the Greek Educational Project  (selected as one of the three "labelled projects" for Greece) and the Internet Forum on Light Pollution - both led by Margarita Metexa - have been connected to the netd@ays project.   An international UNESCO-backed conference on "Youth and Light Pollution" was held in Athens in November, 2003.

•     Annual national meetings of the amateur astronomers of Chile (CA2000 in Copiapo, CA2001 in Talca and CA2002 in Antofagasta) have included use of a portable planetarium donated by the Gemini 8m telescopes project to the local Chilean "Redlaser" IVth region schools network - whose high-school students have traveled under grants from the conference organizers to educate the schoolteachers!    Over 85,000 Chilean schoolchildren from over 100 local schools have passed through the two Gemini/STARLAB planetaria in the first 4 years of operation; the program includes a dramatic demonstration of the effects of light pollution on the visibility of stars in the night sky..  3 teachers in Hawai'i and 3 in La Serena visited each other's schools in 2003 under the Gemini/Redlaser/ "Sister-city" program "StarTeachers"; Internet2 connections are being used for a variety of international videoconferences related to light pollution now that AURA's observatory in Chile is connected.  The Astronomical Society of the Pacific's "Project ASTRO", through the excellent outreach team at the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson is developing programs over this link, including "ASTRO-Chile", involving spanish-language videoconference exchanges between teachers in Tucson, USA and La Serena, Chile (Malcolm Smith).

•    Sky Background Monitoring.  Our new chairman, Hugo Schwarz (welcome, Hugo), has been working to create a network of especially sensitive all-sky monitors based on Roger Smith's Tololo All-Sky Camera (TASCA).  These give online displays on the web of cloud and light-pollution conditions at several astronomical sites.  Hugo Schwarz and Alistair Walker have also modelled the future growth of light pollution (or lack of it)  in the area near the Gemini South and SOAR sites on Cerro Pachon; here one can see the positive effects of controlling light pollution. 
  

• WG science and business meetings.  Click on "Conferences" to get reports and powerpoint presentations from the WG meeting held in Sydney during the IAU General Assembly in July, 2003.   A report on the highly successful, 3-day meeting of the Working Group in Chile, in early March, 2002 (edited by WG chairman, Hugo Schwarz), is now available.  This report includes all the powerpoint presentations which were presented at the conference (including some in English, others in Spanish).  The meeting also included a successful session in support of Commission 50 activities to provide RFI protection for the ALMA site in Northern Chile. A valuable world-wide press release followed our meetings in Manchester in August, 2000, which in turn led to a series of positive press interviews, including an article in "The Economist" featuring the work of two members of our working group (Pierantonio Cinzano and David Crawford) and the (then) President of Commission 50, Jim Cohen.  Several working-group members gave presentations at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC, January 2002 (sessions 104 and 120).  (All).

Last revised: 17th February, 2006