Light Pollution Modeling

Abstract

The growth of urban development and its accompanying outdoor lighting has made the search for new observatory sites increasingly difficult. A method of predicting the brightness of the night sky produced by a city of known population and distance is useful in making studies of prospective new observatory sites, as well as in studying the likely future deterioration of existing sites. Other sources of light pollution can be investigated using the same model. In most cases, several cities are responsible for the light pollution at a given site, and the predicted night sky brightness is the sum of the contributions of all the cities. In this paper, we shall review the surprisingly little work which has been done on predicting night sky brightnesses from model calculations.