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Is light pollution getting better or worse?

Awareness of light pollution is spreading, but with changing lighting technologies, emissions are shifting to wavelengths our current measuring devices cannot assess well. Community involvement is essential to evaluate changes in sky brightness.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of naked-eye limiting magnitude observations from Globe at Night in 2015 to sky brightness predictions from Falchi et al.12.
Fig. 2: Estimation of the NELM using the Loss of the Night app by a project participant from Portugal.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges funding from the European Unionʼs Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 689443 via project GEOEssential.

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Correspondence to Christopher C. M. Kyba.

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Kyba, C.C.M. Is light pollution getting better or worse?. Nat Astron 2, 267–269 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0402-7

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