By Lucía García & Jaime Zamorano – UCM 

The III Congreso ProAm de la Sociedad Española de Astronomía was a meeting point between the community of professional astronomers and the very active community of astronomy enthusiasts in Spain.
Our researchers have attended this conference in order to present Street Spectra with a poster describing the motivation being the change in technology lighting is suffering around the World. The poster includes a method to characterise street lamps by taking a picture with a diffraction granting on top to the phone camera. Finally it shows a quick guide to analyse the results by comparison with known spectra.

StreetSpectra

Astronomy is possibly the science in which non-“scientific” personnel contribute more to the advancement of knowledge.

Amateur astronomers continue to discover comets and asteroids, refine the orbits of double stars, detect new features in the dynamic atmospheres of giant planets, characterize the variability in the brightness of stars.

They also actively contribute to determine the activity of meteor showers and racing paths, study stellar populations of open clusters using photometry, discover tidal tails and other interaction features in nearby galaxies, and are even already daring to observe transits of exoplanets and obtain spectra of planets, stars, supernovae and galaxies.

Download the StreetSpectra poster in HR