Project Nightfield Network is a student-led citizen-science and engineering initiative studying how artificial light and other human activity affect nighttime environments. Our goal is to build a distributed network of observations from schools, parks, campuses, observatories, neighborhoods, and other community spaces, then use those observations to identify practical opportunities for improvement.
Participants follow a simple cycle: Measure → Act → Verify. Volunteers begin with a Night Audit, documenting sky visibility, outdoor lighting conditions, the surrounding environment, and optional soundscape observations using a standardized starter protocol. When appropriate, participants can then develop a realistic improvement recommendation for their site and return later to document whether conditions changed. The goal is not simply to raise awareness, but to create comparable before-and-after evidence of real nighttime environmental conditions.
Nightfield also includes Nightfield Labs, an open technical track where students and other contributors can help develop tools that make this work more useful and scalable. Current directions include low-cost environmental sensing through NightNode, sensor calibration and repeatability research, GIS and satellite-data analysis through Nightfield Atlas, standardized imaging, computer vision, and machine learning. Participants do not need technical experience to conduct a Night Audit, while those with engineering, programming, data, astronomy, or environmental-science experience can contribute to the supporting technology and research.
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