The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness

Abstract

Artificial lights raise night sky luminance, creating themost visible effect of light pollution—artificial skyglow. Despite the increasing interest among scientists in fields such as ecology, astronomy, health care, and land-use planning, light pollution lacks a current quantification of itsmagnitude ona global scale. Toovercome this, wepresent the worldatlas of artificial sky luminance, computed with our light pollution propagation software usingnewhigh-resolution satellite data and new precision sky brightness measurements. This atlas shows that more than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than one-third of humanity, including 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. Moreover, 23% of the world’s land surfaces between 75°N and 60°S, 88% of Europe, and almost half of the United States experience light- polluted nights. INTRODUCTION