Video
Clear Skies and Dark Skies Monitoring
Transcript
Active Research at Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument: Clear Skies and Dark Skies Monitoring with Physical Scientist Eathan McIntyre
[Narrator] Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument is a vast and rugged landscape. Mountains and plateaus stretch far into the distance.
These viewscapes are an essential feature of the remoteness that defines Parashant.
The monument preserves a vestige of the west prior to American settlement, free from intensive development. However, these views may be under threat.
Urban centers in the desert southwest are rapidly expanding. In fact, one of Parashant’s nearest neighbors, St. George Utah, is currently the fastest growing city in America. Will this increased activity create more air pollution and haze? Are the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip far enough away to preserve dark nights?
Monument researchers are working to better understand the situation. Meet physical scientist Eathan McIntyre. Eathan is installing a system of monitoring stations of his own design to collect data on air quality and light pollution. He wants to know how these changes could affect both visitors and wildlife.
[Eathan] I developed this system of timelapse imaging cameras that actually look across the landscape, and we’re trying to create metrics. One of the aspects of air quality is transparency, which is how clear is the air, and what does that mean to the visitor? How far can they see?
These aren’t just roadside stations. A lot of these sites have to be remote locations as far as getting the view shots that we want to get captured.
A typical station involves a tripod, solar panel, and of course the camera assembly. These cameras are timelapse cameras taking an image about once every minute. What’s really cool about this project is that not only am I just getting timelapse, but I can develop meaningful metrics –as in how many miles can you see across the horizon?
Our setup here is about 110 Watts. It’s about enough to charge a cell phone, laptop, but we have plenty of power up here to run our station, get our cameras up and running.
Just checking over some of these scripts here, make sure they’re all where I need them to be, as far as waking up and shutting down. We’ll be leaving the station here for about 6 months, coming back in the spring.
We set up two cameras at two different locations, looking at the same target. And what we’re able to do is generate pixel values, basically we’re looking at the mountains here along with the sky above us. Are they brighter, darker over time? And what we’re able to do from there is create basically a ratio. . We’re seeing the camera and pixel values, and so we actually put those values into our equation and from there we actually generate how visible the actual air is.
So we get some great numbers off this. So you can see right here we go ahead and put the numbers into our equation. For example here on a really good day we see 35 miles of clear air. That’s one of our best days. On one of our poor days, we’re seeing fire events, here we see maybe only 3 to 5 miles of visibility. That’s when we just see all sorts of smoke from wildfires come into the -into our west half of the monument and it really obscures our view.
We also pick up artificial sources from road surfaces, people out there in long convoys kicking up dust. So this is really meaningful. We’re not just generating just great timelapse images, we’re seeing some really meaningful metrics as far as how clear the air is and what does that mean to the visitor experience.
One of the trends we’re thinking about is what is going on with -as urban centers expand around the monument- how much smoke is just coming from just common urban center use such as fire places and just automobiles? So what we’re actually looking for is seeing if there’s any kind of long term trend as far as are we seeing escalating levels of smoke and dust. So these cameras are able to pick up those trends.
[Narrator] Development and city lights threaten dark night skies as well. Eathan’s stations are equipped to monitor the night sky over Parashant and sky glow from neighboring metropolitan areas.
[Eathan] This night sky camera is actually special for astronomy. It has a very sensitive CMOS sensor in it. We program it so that it basically stays open for 45 seconds and we’re able to capture all the natural light from the Milky Way, constellations, stars.
Parashant dark skies are actually a remnant of what we see for the Wild West, basically no development. And that’s what’s really cool about Parashant, is that we have very little development as far as structures, and lightbulbs. However, what we see, even from about 95 miles away, we’re still picking up the sky glow from Las Vegas and Mesquite, St. George, Utah.
A lot of our wildlife we see out here is nocturnal. These are arid landscapes, desert environments, so a lot of the wildlife activity occurs after sunset. And these animals rely on dark skies, and the pattern of the moon going across the landscape. And so what happens, what we see here, we get this artificial sky glow. We’re seeing that it creates sort of a second moon effect. These animals are getting confused, and it’s going to change their behavior.
[Narrator] Desert wildlife, like humans, are synced to the cycles of day and night. Each in their own way. Nearly 50 species of birds on the monument migrate at night. They navigate by the stars and become disoriented by bright artificial lights. Kangaroo rats forage less under the full moon to avoid predators. A nearby city mimicking the light of the full moon, prevents the rat from eating enough to be able to reproduce.
[Eathan] Are these landscapes getting lighter or darker? Are the urban centers giving us impacts? It’s really meaningful to be able to tell what our neighbors are doing out there.
[Narrator] For more information on dark skies and light pollution, visit the International Dark Sky Association at DarkSky.org
Grand-Canyon Parashant National Monument is an International Dark Sky Monument.
Description
Clear Skies and Dark Skies Monitoring
Duration
8 minutes, 59 seconds
Credit
NPS/Conner Henzel
Date Created
02/19/2019
Copyright and Usage Info