The darkSky repository allows users to easily determine the times when the sky is the darkest for a desired location and date range (i.e. the times when the Sun is -18 degrees below the horizon and there is no moon present in the sky).
Hosted on GitHub Pages here, the darkSky project allows users to effortlessly determine the optimal moments of darkness during the night sky. By inputting a desired date range, latitude/longitude coordinates and timezone, this project calculates the times when there is no observable moon in the sky and the center of the sun is 18 degrees or more below the horizon. The primary objective of darkSky is to support a community science initiative for long-term light pollution monitoring by facilitating the identification of ideal periods when the absence of astronomical twilight and the moon's presence converge.
darkSky simplifies the process of identifying these critical time windows, empowering researchers, citizen scientists, and environmental advocates to contribute to global efforts in understanding and mitigating the effects of artificial light on our night skies.
Soon to come
- Ability to download a .csv file of the generated times.
- Display all data used to calculate darkSky times (astronomical twilight start/end, moon rise/set).
If you use darkSky in your research, please cite it using the DOI provided by Zenodo.
This project would not have been possible without:
- This project uses Astronomy Engine, a suite of open source libraries for calculating positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets, and for predicting interesting events like oppositions, conjunctions, rise and set times, lunar phases, eclipses, transits, and more..