Figure 1. Skyglow reduces the visibility of celestial objects for both the human eye and consumer cameras.

The GLOBE at Night project works by assessing the visibility of stars near constellations like Orion, shown here. This image, entitled “Light pollution: it's not pretty” was produced by Jeremy Stanley and is released under the CC BY 2.0 license (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Light_pollution_It%27s_not_pretty.jpg), access date 18 January 2013.