Modeling the Night Sky Brightness Distribution via New SkyGlow Simulator

Regional/global increase of excessive artificial light currently is one of the most pressing environmental concerns in the public's eye. It is not surprise that a proper qualification and quantification of light pollution levels became important issue worldwide. The decisive effects of light sources and atmospheric environment on the diffuse light of a night sky have also been recognized, but remain difficult to predict. While some progress has been made in the past several years, the light source properties (such as spectrum, radiant intensity distribution, total emissivity, spatial distribution of individual lamps, etc.) and also atmospheric optics still remain the largest source of uncertainty in sky glow modeling and light pollution characterization. We have developed a tool that makes the numerical simulation of sky glow possible for complex systems, including arbitrarily arranged light sources and arbitrary turbidity conditions. The input to the model and a few numerical demonstrations are discussed in the paper.