Measuring Light Pollution

[CKemu]

I have been pondering an idea; if you took a n length exposure at a pre-determined f/ stop, ISO and used "usable" night sky conditions (eg; those you'd actually attempt astrophotography under).

You could essentially record the "colour" of your night sky and compare it to others around you.

I know tools exist that you can buy to measure your sky quality, but I thought this was possibly more practical as all of us who do astrophotography would clearly have a camera already.

Much like a pH test will give you a colour indicator as to the pH of a solution, we could use our photos and compare them to a colour chart.

I feel that this sort of data would be more useful, and potentially more accurate compared to existing light pollution maps as they lack the fine detail, and tend to just blanket an area. Friends of mine have possibly spuriously noted that some inner suburban areas are less polluted than maps suggested.

Any thoughts? Has this been done before, being done currently - or would something like this - crowd sourced be rather useful as a community effort?

[Freddie]

I guess for this to work, everyone would need to use the exact same camera and lens or camera and scope set-up for the results to be comparable.

[nmoushon]

Freddie is right if you are trying to make a accurate map of a large area using a large number of people to help. But here is a site I found a while back that everyone can do individually to find out what roughly their sky pollution levels are. Haven't got around to it myself since clear skies are few and far between at the moment and I'd rather spend that time imaging than doing an experiment.