The growing emissions of artificial light to the atmosphere are producing, among other effects, a significant increase of the night sky brightness (NSB) above its expected natural values. A permanent sensor network has been deployed in Galicia (northwest of Iberian peninsula) to monitor the anthropogenic disruption of the night sky darkness in a countrywide area. The network is composed of 14 detectors integrated in automated weather stations of MeteoGalicia, the Galician public meteorological agency. Zenithal NSB readings are taken every minute and the results are openly available in real time for researchers, interested stakeholders and the public at large through a dedicated website. The measurements allow one to assess the extent of the loss of the natural night in urban, periurban, transition and dark rural sites, as well as its daily and monthly time courses. Two metrics are introduced here to characterize the disruption of the night darkness across the year: the significant magnitude (m1/3) and the moonlight modulation factor (γ). The significant magnitude shows that in clear and moonless nights the zenithal night sky in the analysed urban settings is typically 14–23 times brighter than expected from a nominal natural dark sky. This factor lies in the range 7–8 in periurban sites, 1.6–2.5 in transition regions and 0.8–1.6 in rural and mountain dark sky places. The presence of clouds in urban areas strongly enhances the amount of scattered light, easily reaching amplification factors in excess of 25, in comparison with the light scattered in the same places under clear sky conditions. The periodic NSB modulation due to the Moon, still clearly visible in transition and rural places, is barely notable at periurban locations and is practically lost at urban sites.

The geometric law of energy conservation is utilized in evaluating the phase transmittance function for axicons with arbitrary distribution of the on-axis intensity. Several simple analytical solutions are presented, and a computer-generated holographic version of the uniform-intensity axicon is examined.

We present a method for manufacturing phase plates to compensate for the wave aberration in the human eye. The wave aberration of the eye is measured in vivo by a new laser ray-tracing method and then compensated for by a phase plate placed in front of the eye. This plate is made from a gray-level single-mask photosculpture in photoresist. Two experiments were carried out, first with an artificial eye and then with a human eye: 80% compensation for the wave aberration was achieved in both cases.

In eye aberrometry it is often necessary to transform the aberration coefficients in order to express them in a scaled, rotated, and/or displaced pupil. This is usually done by applying to the original coefficients vector a set of matrices accounting for each elementary transformation. We describe an equivalent algebraic approach that allows us to perform this conversion in a single step and in a straightforward way. This approach can be applied to any particular definition, normalization, and ordering of the Zernike polynomials, and can handle a wide range of pupil transformations, including, but not restricted to, anisotropic scalings. It may also be used to transform the aberration coefficients between different polynomial basis sets.

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These results suggest that the automatic attraction of attention by a peripheral cue results in improved sensory processing at the cued location. This facilitation is replaced by an inhibitory effect when SOA increases, although cue informativeness may modulate this effect. Central cueing does not affect sensory processing at the P1 level.

The light pollution levels experienced at any given site generally depend on a wide number of artificial light sources distributed throughout the surrounding territory. Since photons can travel long distances before being scattered by the atmosphere, any effective proposal for reducing local light pollution levels needs an accurate assessment of the relative weight of all intervening light sources, including those located tens or even hundreds of km away. In this paper we describe several ways of quantifying and visualizing these relative weights. Particular emphasis is made on the aggregate contribution of the municipalities, which are -in many regions of the world-the administrative bodies primarily responsible for the planning and maintenance of public outdoor lighting systems.

The positioning tolerances for phase plates used to compensate human eye aberrations are analyzed. Lateral displacements, in-plane rotations, and axial translations are considered, describing analytic and numerical procedures to compute the maximum degree of compensation achievable in each case. The compensation loss is found to be dependent both on the kind and the amount of misalignment and on the particular composition of the aberration pattern of each subject in terms of Zernike polynomials. We applied these procedures to a set of human eye aberrations measured with the laser ray-tracing method. The general trend of results suggests that lateral positioning, followed by angular positioning, are the key factors affecting compensation performance in practical setups, whereas axial positioning has far less stringent requirements.