First night and morning
....woke up this morning before sunrise and thought: wow this is bright (I mean the daylight or twilight).
For some reason I expected a grey and deppressing day, but here in Kiruna its already 3 hours daytime (you can check www.timeanddate.com for your place of interest) and its extremely beautiful as the sun stays so close to the horizon (about 1°) - its amazing. I measured illuminance to be 950 lx during midday. Still most people and the town leave the lights on almost the entire day.
Also during the night all the lights are on everywhere. Lamps that illuminate footpaths that are buried under 3 m of snow stay on all night. I understand there is a demand for light under these circumstances (polar night, slippery roads) but smart technology with dimming and on-demand light can help a lot (see article with video about street lights in Norway).
So what did I do last night. Mounted the SQM on the roof of the car and drove around at night to measure with the roadrunner system.
Weather was clear with few high altitude clouds. Sometimes there was (icy?) fog. I wanted to map the skyglow (see work by Jaime Zamorana et al. of Madrid). Of course there were the usual technical problems: GPS not working, SQM housing was freezing in when driving through that ice fog.
The hunt for darkness was (expectedly near Kiruna) not very successfull. Lowest sky brightness was 20.6 driving the E10 south-eastwards (after the town Svappavaara) and 21.3 driving the E10 towards the North-East (between Torneträsk and Rensjön villages). Besides the clouds, there was some airglow present.
In total, I drove 267 km in about 4.5 hours.
For some reason I expected a grey and deppressing day, but here in Kiruna its already 3 hours daytime (you can check www.timeanddate.com for your place of interest) and its extremely beautiful as the sun stays so close to the horizon (about 1°) - its amazing. I measured illuminance to be 950 lx during midday. Still most people and the town leave the lights on almost the entire day.
Also during the night all the lights are on everywhere. Lamps that illuminate footpaths that are buried under 3 m of snow stay on all night. I understand there is a demand for light under these circumstances (polar night, slippery roads) but smart technology with dimming and on-demand light can help a lot (see article with video about street lights in Norway).
So what did I do last night. Mounted the SQM on the roof of the car and drove around at night to measure with the roadrunner system.
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| The ice-road runner SQM |
The hunt for darkness was (expectedly near Kiruna) not very successfull. Lowest sky brightness was 20.6 driving the E10 south-eastwards (after the town Svappavaara) and 21.3 driving the E10 towards the North-East (between Torneträsk and Rensjön villages). Besides the clouds, there was some airglow present.
In total, I drove 267 km in about 4.5 hours.
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| All-sky image taken with fisheye lens near Torneträsk |
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