Chicago Transect Experiment

What is Chicago Transect Experiment?

The transact experiment was conducted in the spring of 2021. The goal was to record and quantify nighttime light emissions and effects of skyglow, simultaneously, at equal intervals, along the line stertching from downtown Chicago all the way out to suburban and rural regions, 144 km from downtown. The experiment was inspired by the similar experiment conducted by Jechow et al in and around Berlin.

The experiment was conducted by the team from Chicago's Adler Planetarium Astronomy department, namely, Ken Walczak, Geza Gyuk, Cynthia Tarr, Jesus Garcia, Claudia Jimenez, Laris Turkic, Jeff Wiedemann, John Walsh, Frederic Johnson and Charles Roche.

What enabled this experiment was the innovative all-sky camera, GONet, developed at the Adler Planetarium. For more details on the GONet, please see our publication in the International Journal of Sustainable Lighting.

The experiment and the preliminary experiment data were presented at the 2021 ALAN Conference (eALAN). 

Get the Experiment Data

If you would like to use our transect experiment data for your own research - you can get it below!

Data is broken up by the GONet camera location, with each zip file containing stacked images for each location, taken between 02:00AM and 06:00AM UTC on May 1st 2021. Every imaging seqence is made up of five 6s and three 1s exposures, that are then stacked.

Images are captured as raw, with a jpeg prepended to make them easier to preview. See GONet publication linked above for more details on this.