Restoring the night sky darkness at Observatorio del Teide: First application of the model Illumina version 2

Aubé, Martin; Simoneau, Alexandre; Muñoz-Tuñón, Casiana; Díaz-Castro, Javier; Serra-Ricart, Miquel
Bibliographical reference

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Advertised on:
7
2020
Number of authors
5
IAC number of authors
3
Citations
15
Refereed citations
12
Description
The propagation of artificial light into real environments is complex. To perform its numerical modelling with accuracy, one must consider hyperspectral properties of the lighting devices and their geographic positions, the hyperspectral properties of the ground reflectance, the size and distribution of small-scale obstacles, the blocking effect of topography, the lamps angular photometry and the atmospheric transfer function (aerosols and molecules). A detailed radiative transfer model can be used to evaluate how a particular change in the lighting infrastructure may affect the sky radiance. In this paper, we use the new version (v2) of the Illumina model to evaluate a night sky restoration plan for the Teide Observatory located on the island of Tenerife, Spain. In the past decades, the sky darkness was severely degraded by growing light pollution on the Tenerife Island. In this work, we use the contribution maps giving the effect of each pixel of the territory to the artificial sky radiance. We exploit the hyperspectral capabilities of Illumina v2 and show how the contribution maps can be integrated over regions or municipalities according to the Johnson-Cousins photometric bands spectral sensitivities. The sky brightness reductions per municipality after a complete shutdown and a conversion to light-emitting diodes are calculated in the Johnson-Cousins B, V, R bands. We found that the conversion of the lighting infrastructure of Tenerife with LED (1800 and 2700 K), according to the conversion strategy in force, would result in a zenith V-band sky brightness reduction of ≍0.3 mag arcsec-2.
Related projects
Project Image
Starbursts in Galaxies GEFE

Starsbursts play a key role in the cosmic evolution of galaxies, and thus in the star formation (SF) history of the universe, the production of metals, and the feedback coupling galaxies with the cosmic web. Extreme SF conditions prevail early on during the formation of the first stars and galaxies, therefore, the starburst phenomenon constitutes a

Casiana
Muñoz Tuñón
Project Image
Minor Bodies of the Solar System

This project studies the physical and compositional properties of the so-called minor bodies of the Solar System, that includes asteroids, icy objects, and comets. Of special interest are the trans-neptunian objects (TNOs), including those considered the most distant objects detected so far (Extreme-TNOs or ETNOs); the comets and the comet-asteroid

Julia de
León Cruz