Through March 8, an organization known as GLOBE at Night is asking for help tallying celestial bodies in the constellation Orion. Designed as a teaching aid, this star-counting program aims to emphasize the loss-of-darkness throughout the globe, a problem which hinders ground-based astronomy. Students, families, and the general public can report their results online by comparing their view of the constellation against images on the program’s website. “Our 2007 results convinced us that a citizen-science campaign like GLOBE at Night is a great way to find dark-sky oases in or near our cities,” says the manager of science education at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson.
