August has been a busy month for the European project STARS4ALL team, who traveled to Tenerife to broadcast live a very special shower: the Perseids. From the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, the team led by Miquel Serra-Ricart (IAC), could experience an astronomical phenomenon – a meteor shower that couldn’t be properly appreciated from large cities due to light pollution.
This year’s meteor shower activity has been moderately intense due to the accumulation of material from the comet Swift-Tuttle over the course of its different orbits around the Sun.
Almost without a break, the team flew to Iceland and Greenland to broadcast a spectacular astronomical phenomenon: the northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, light curtains that light up the sky.
During the expedition the sun showed high activity thanks to the peak reached in 2014. Combined with the good meteorological weather, the conditions were fantastic for capturing amazing aurora videos and pictures.
They are certainly so spectacular that NASA selected one of them as APOD (Astronomical Picture of the Day)
STARS4ALL is a multidisciplinary European project with different initiatives working together to study light pollution and protect dark skies. During the trip the team set up a photometer in Iceland. This device will send data to Madrid, so Icelandic sky-glow will be measured as part of the European Photometer Network STARS4ALL project led by UCM.
Check out all the initiatives for improving lighting quality in STARS4ALL webpage: http://www.stars4all.eu
Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPSSI) is manage by the Coordination and Support Action CHiC project which is funded under Grant Agreement No. 687686 by the European Commission.