Astronomical site characterization with the Illumina light model

Hector Linares Arroyo ( Cégep de Sherbrooke Université de Sherbrooke )


Illumina is one of the most precise and reliable light pollution models at the time of this writing. For the last decade it has been used for assessing the quality of the night sky, for pointing out main sources of light pollution and for comparing different lighting systems before the actual installation.

This model, however, has hardly been used outside the developing team. There are two main reasons. The first reason is that it takes weeks (for a light pollution expert) to learn how to handle all the variables and files that the model requires. And second, because it is designed to be run in a CPU cluster, a kind of facility not available for many.

Illumina Light aims to solve those problems. It is a simplified version of Illumina designed to be run in a domestic laptop. It is managed from a user friendly visual interface that in its first version allows the user to estimate V band sky brightness for the zenith direction in any location desired in less than ten minutes (8 CPU laptop).

The astronomical community is encouraged to use it when trying to compare the quality of the night sky over different locations, for instance when looking for the best place to install astronomical instrumentation.