Abstract
Light pollution, the alteration of the natural light levels in the night environment produced by man-made light, is one of the most rapidly increasing threats to the natural environment. The fast growth of the night sky brightness due to light pollution not only is damaging the perception of the starry sky but it is silently altering even the perception of the moonlight nights by mankind. The cyclic alternation between the new Moon's dark sky with thousand of stars and the moonlight sky, less dark but always full of stars among which our satellite moves, is rapidly changing toward a perennial artificial moonlight due to the man-made light wasted in the atmosphere. The Moon periodically will appear inside the same perennially luminous sky from which stars will have almost disappeared. Here we present a map showing “artificial moonlight” levels in North America and some statistical results.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cinzano, P.: 1994, Internal Report 11, Department of Astronomy, Padova, www.pd.astro.it/cinzano/refer/
Cinzano, P.: 2000a, Mem. Soc. Astron. Ital. 71, 93–112.
Cinzano, P.: 2000b, Mem. Soc. Astron. Ital. 71, 113–130.
Cinzano, P., Falchi, F., Elvidge, C. D., and Baugh, K. E.: 2000, MNRAS 318, 641–657.
Cinzano, P., Falchi, F., and Elvidge, C. D.: 2001a, MNRAS 323, 34–46.
Cinzano, P., Falchi, F., and Elvidge, C. D.: 2001b (submitted).
Cohen, J. and Sullivan, W. T. (eds.): 2000, Preserving the Astronomical Sky, ASP (in press).
Crawford, D. L. (ed.): 1991, IAU Coll. 112. ASP Conf. Ser., 17.
Dobson, J. E., Bright, E. A., Coleman, P. R., Durfee, R. C., and Worley, B. A.: 2000, Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sens. 66, 849–858.
Elvidge, C. D. et al.: 1999, Remote Sens. Environ. 68, 77–88.
Elvidge, C. D. et al.: 2000, Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sensing (submitted).
Falchi, F. and Cinzano, P.: 2000, Mem. Soc. Astron. Ital. 71, 153–158.
Garstang, R. H.: 1986, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 98, 364–375.
Garstang, R. H.: 1989a, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 101, 306–329.
Garstang, R. H.: 1989b, Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 27, 19–40.
Garstang, R. H.: 1991, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 103, 1109–1116.
Garstang, R. H.: 2000, Mem. Soc. Astron. Ital. 71, 83–92.
Isobe, S. and Hirayama, T. (eds.): 1998, ASP Conf. Ser. 139.
Krisciunas, K. and Schaefer, B.E. 1991, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 103, 1033–1039.
McNally, D. (ed.): 1994, The Vanishing Universe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Schaefer, B. E.: 1993, Vistas in Astronomy 36, 311–361.
Walker, M.: 1987, NOAO Newsletter 10, 16.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cinzano, P., Falchi, F. & Elvidge, C.D. Moonlight Without The Moon. Earth, Moon, and Planets 85, 517–522 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017083208286
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017083208286