An Innovative New Approach to Light Pollution Measurement by Drone

Abstract

The study of light pollution is a relatively new and specific field of measurement. The current literature is dominated by articles that describe the use of ground and satellite data as a source of information on light pollution. However, there is a need to study the phenomenon on a microscale, i.e., locally within small locations such as housing estates, parks, buildings, or even inside buildings. Therefore, there is an important need to measure light pollution at a lower level, at the low level of the skyline. In this paper, the authors present a new drone design for light pollution measurement. A completely new original design for an unmanned platform for light pollution measurement is presented, which is adapted to mount custom sensors (not originally designed to be mounted on a unmanned aerial vehicles) allowing registration in the nadir and zenith directions. The application and use of traditional photometric sensors in the new configuration, such as the spectrometer and the sky quality meter (SQM), is presented. A multispectral camera for nighttime measurements, a calibrated visible-light camera, is used. The results of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are generated products that allow the visualisation of multimodal photometric data together with the presence of a geographic coordinate system. This paper also presents the results from field experiments during which the light spectrum is measured with the installed sensors. As the results show, measurements at night, especially with multispectral cameras, allow the assessment of the spectrum emitted by street lamps, while the measurement of the sky quality depends on the flight height only up to a 10 m above ground level.