Globe at Night: Reaching Tens of Thousands of Citizen Scientists Online During COVID-19

Abstract:

As a result of COVID-19, online resources and programs for STEM education have become more imperative. In the context of promoting and implementing online citizen science programs, partnerships have become very important, especially for Globe at Night. Globe at Night (GaN) is an international, online citizen-science campaign to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution by inviting citizen-scientists to measure and submit their night sky brightness observations. Only two of the fourteen, year-long GaN campaigns since 2006 have acquired as much participation as in the first six months of 2020. What began as an effort to gather more data for a researcher at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences to do analyses of light pollution in 2011 versus 2020, evolved into two themes for February and March 2020: “Love Your Stars” and “Pi in the Sky”. In April the GaN team partnered with SciStarter for Citizen Science Month, as well as Astronomers Without Borders for Global Astronomy Month. The partnership with SciStarter also included monthly webinars with libraries across the USA. The May GaN campaign focused on the International Day of Light and the International Dark-Sky Association’s good lighting practices. However, June GaN campaign exceeded all expectations, with nearly 8000 observations within the 10-day campaign. 6700 of those observations came from one night, June 21, due to the partnership with the Australasian Dark Sky Alliance. Spain has the third most measurements in the world this year (3300 through July). These were not from the Spanish mainland, but from the island of La Palma (740 square kilometers) in the Canaries. For the first 7 campaigns of 2020, 87 countries participated in Globe at Night. The large numbers of GaN observations indicate the robustness, accessibility, and inclusiveness of the program to international participants. In our presentation, we will discuss how these partnerships work and future plans to expand the program.