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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
skyglowberlin@fediscience.org ("Christopher Kyba πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί") wrote:

By changing the lights on different nights, it let us extrapolate to find out how bright the city would be if it turned off all the streetlights completely.

The result was surprising: if all the streetlights were turned off completely, Tucson would barely change in the satellite image. After midnight, only about 13% of the light from Tucson that's seen from space comes from streetlights.

(4/)

Graph showing six data points with a fit drawn through them, and extrapolated to zero. The line is quite flat, because streetlights don't make up much of Tucson's light after midnight.