Jaime Zamorano's research while affiliated with Complutense University of Madrid and other places

Publications (151)

Article
Full-text available
Recent works have made strong efforts to produce standardised photometry in RGB bands. For this purpose, we carefully defined the transmissivity curves of RGB bands and defined a set of standard sources using the photometric information present in Gaia EDR3. This work aims not only to significantly increase the number and accuracy of RGB standards...
Article
We provide radiometric evidence of the relevance of nearby light sources on the artificial brightness of the night sky. To obtain the required data we developed a method based on the use of power-regulated urban lighting systems, which also provides relevant information on the propagation of light pollution at short distances from the sources. A co...
Article
Due to the typical ambient light levels in inhabited places and light pollution of the night sky, most naked-eye astronomical observations are performed nowadays under mesopic conditions. The luminance (cd/m2) associated with the brightness of the night sky specified in the astronomical logarithmic scale of magnitudes per square arcsecond (mag/arcs...
Article
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Citizen science involves laymen in some steps of a scientific experiment: citizens are volunteers devoting their free time to citizen science projects. Therefore it is important to investigate the factors influencing their motivation and engagement. In this paper, we present our study to investigate the motivation factors of the TESS photometer net...
Preprint
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Nighttime images taken with DSLR cameras from the International Space Station (ISS) can provide valuable information on the spatial and temporal variation of artificial nighttime lighting on Earth. In particular, this is the only source of historical and current visible multispectral data across the world (DMSP/OLS and SNPP/VIIRS-DNB data are panch...
Article
Full-text available
Nighttime images taken with DSLR cameras from the International Space Station (ISS) can provide valuable information on the spatial and temporal variation of artificial nighttime lighting on Earth. In particular, this is the only source of historical and current visible multispectral data across the world (DMSP/OLS and SNPP/VIIRS-DNB data are panch...
Article
Although a catalogue of synthetic RGB magnitudes, providing photometric data for a sample of 1346 bright stars, has been recently published, its usefulness is still limited due to the small number of reference stars available, considering that they are distributed throughout the whole celestial sphere, and the fact that they are restricted to Johns...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although a catalogue of synthetic RGB magnitudes, providing photometric data for a sample of 1346 bright stars, has been recently published, its usefulness is still limited due to the small number of reference stars available, considering that they are distributed throughout the whole celestial sphere, and the fact that they are restricted to Johns...
Article
Full-text available
Long-term monitoring of the evolution of the artificial night sky brightness is a key tool for developing science-informed public policies and assessing the efficacy of light pollution mitigation measures. Detecting the underlying artificial brightness trend is a challenging task, since the typical night sky brightness signal shows a large variabil...
Article
Full-text available
Major schemes to replace other streetlight technologies with Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lamps are being undertaken across much of the world. This is predicted to have important consequences for nighttime sky brightness and color. Here, we report the results of a long-term study of these characteristics focused on the skies above Madrid. The sky bri...
Article
Full-text available
Although the use of RGB photometry has exploded in the last decades due to the advent of high-quality and inexpensive digital cameras equipped with Bayer-like color filter systems, there is surprisingly no catalogue of bright stars that can be used for calibration purposes. Since due to their excessive brightness, accurate enough spectrophotometric...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although the use of RGB photometry has exploded in the last decades due to the advent of high-quality and inexpensive digital cameras equipped with Bayer-like color filter systems, there is surprisingly no catalogue of bright stars that can be used for calibration purposes. Since due to their excessive brightness, accurate enough spectrophotometric...
Article
Full-text available
’Lockdown’ periods in response to COVID-19 have provided a unique opportunity to study the impacts of economic activity on environmental pollution (e.g., NO2, aerosols, noise, light). The effects on NO2 and aerosols have been very noticeable and readily demonstrated, but that on light pollution has proven challenging to determine. The main reason f...
Article
Full-text available
Increased exposure to artificial light at night can affect human health including disruption 1 of melatonin production and circadian rhythms and extend to increased risks of hormonal cancers 2 and other serious diseases. In addition, multiple negative impacts on fauna and flora are well 3 documented, and it is a matter of fact that artificial light...
Preprint
Full-text available
Long-term monitoring of the evolution of the artificial night sky brightness is a key tool for developing science-informed public policies and assessing the efficacy of light pollution mitigation measures. Detecting the underlying artificial brightness trend is a challenging task, since the typical night sky brightness signal shows a large variabil...
Preprint
Full-text available
'Lockdown' periods in response to COVID-19 have provided a unique opportunity to study the impacts of economic activity on environmental pollution (e.g. NO$_2$, aerosols, noise, light). The effects on NO$_2$ and aerosols have been very noticeable and readily demonstrated, but that on light pollution has proven challenging to determine. The main rea...
Preprint
Full-text available
Increased exposure to artificial light at night can affect human health including disruption of melatonin production and circadian rhythms and extend to increased risks of hormonal cancers and other serious diseases. In addition, multiple negative impacts on fauna and flora are well documented, and it is a matter of fact that artificial light at ni...
Article
Full-text available
Diffuse glow has been observed around brightly lit cities in nighttime satellite imagery since at least the first publication of large scale maps in the late 1990s. In the literature, this has often been assumed to be an error related to the sensor, and referred to as “blooming”, presumably in relation to the effect that can occur when using a CCD...
Preprint
Full-text available
The visual brightness of the night sky is not a single-valued function of its brightness in other photometric bands, because the transformations between photometric systems depend on the spectral power distribution of the skyglow. We analyze the transformation between the night sky brightness in the Johnson-Cousins V band (mV, measured in magnitude...
Article
Full-text available
The visual brightness of the night sky is not a single-valued function of its brightness in other photometric bands, because the transformations between photometric systems depend on the spectral power distribution of the skyglow. We analyze the transformation between the night sky brightness in the Johnson-Cousins V band (m V , measured in magnitu...
Article
Full-text available
Integrated multispectral devices provide convenient means for assessing the inputs to the five known photoreceptors present in the human retina. These photoreceptors drive relevant visual and non-visual pathways that control key aspects of human physiology. In this Letter we show that standard metrics of retinal photoreceptoral exposure can be quan...
Preprint
Diffuse glow has been observed around brightly lit cities in nighttime satellite imagery since at least the first publication of large scale maps in the late 1990s. In the literature, this has often been assumed to be an error related to the sensor, and referred to as "blooming", presumably in relation to the effect that can occur when using a CCD...
Article
Full-text available
Consumer cameras, particularly onboard smartphones and UAVs, are now commonly used as scientific instruments. However, their data processing pipelines are not optimized for quantitative radiometry and their calibration is more complex than that of scientific cameras. The lack of a standardized calibration methodology limits the interoperability bet...
Preprint
Full-text available
Consumer cameras, particularly onboard smartphones and UAVs, are now commonly used as scientific instruments. However, their data processing pipelines are not optimized for quantitative radiometry and their calibration is more complex than that of scientific cameras. The lack of a standardized calibration methodology limits the interoperability bet...
Article
Full-text available
Monitoring long-term trends in the evolution of the anthropogenic night sky brightness is a demanding task due to the high dynamic range of the artificial and natural light emissions and the high variability of the atmospheric conditions that determine the amount of light scattered in the direction of the observer. In this paper, we analyze the use...
Article
Full-text available
Night-time lights interact with human physiology through different pathways starting at the retinal layers of the eye; from the signals provided by the rods; the S-, Land M-cones; and the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGC). These individual photic channels combine in complex ways to modulate important physiological processe...
Article
Full-text available
We develop a general optical model and describe the absolute radiometric calibration of the readings provided by two widely-used night sky brightness sensors based on irradiance-to-frequency conversion. The calibration involves the precise determination of the overall spectral sensitivity of the devices and also the constant G relating the output f...
Preprint
Full-text available
Night-time lights interact with human physiology through different pathways starting at the retinal layers of the eye, from the signals provided by the rods, the S-, L- and M-cones, and the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGC). These individual photic channels combine in complex ways to modulate important physiological proces...
Article
Full-text available
Sensors on remote sensing satellites have provided useful tools for evaluation of the environmental impacts of nighttime artificial light pollution. However, due to their panchromatic nature, the data available from these sensors (VIIRS/DNB and DMSP/OLS) has a limited capacity accurately to assess this impact. Moreover, in some cases, recorded vari...
Article
Full-text available
We analyse the outburst experienced by the September ∈-Perseid meteor shower on 2013 September 9. As a result of our monitoring, the atmospheric trajectory of 60 multistation events observed over Spain was obtained and accurate orbital data were derived from them. On the basis of these orbits, we have tried to determine the likely parent body of th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
MEGARA is the new generation IFU and MOS optical spectrograph built for the 10.4m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC). The project was developed by a consortium led by UCM (Spain) that also includes INAOE (Mexico), IAA-CSIC (Spain) and UPM (Spain). The instrument arrived to GTC on March 28 th 2017 and was successfully integrated and commissioned at the...
Article
Light is pervasive in the leaf environment, creating opportunities for both plants and pathogens to cue into light as a signal to regulate plant‐microbe interactions. Light enhances plant defenses and regulates opening of stomata, an entry point for foliar bacterial pathogens such as Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 (PsPto). The effect of lig...
Article
Full-text available
The night sky spectra of light-polluted areas is the result of the artificial light scattered back from the atmosphere and the reemission of the light after reflections in painted surfaces. This emission comes mainly from street and decorative lamps. We have built an extensive database of lamps spectra covering from UV to near IR and the software n...
Article
Full-text available
We present the main features of TESS-W, the first version of a series of inexpensive but reliable photometers that will be used to measure night sky brightness. The bandpass is extended to the red with respect of that of the Sky Quality Meter (SQM). TESS-W connects to a router via WIFI and it sends automatically the brightness values to a data repo...
Article
Full-text available
Under stable atmospheric conditions, the zenithal brightness of the urban sky varies throughout the night following the time course of the anthropogenic emissions of light. Different types of artificial light sources (e.g. streetlights, residential, and vehicle lights) present specific time signatures, and this feature makes it possible to estimate...
Article
Full-text available
Light pollution is a worldwide phenomenon whose consequences for the natural environment and the human health are being intensively studied nowadays. Most published studies address issues related with light pollution inland. Coastal waters, however, are spaces of high environmental interest, due to their biodiversity richness and their economical s...
Presentation
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Sample of pioneer and influential studies on remote sensing at night on the last ten years.
Technical Report
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Spectra of the lamps that are used for public lighting and ornamental purposes have been obtained with a portable spectrograph around Madrid city. The database is presented in this report along with a description of the procedures.
Article
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We present a study of the night sky brightness around the extended metropolitan area of Madrid using Sky Quality Meter (SQM) photometers. The map is the first to cover the spatial distribution of the sky brightness in the center of the Iberian peninsula. These surveys are neccessary to test the light pollution models that predict night sky brightne...
Article
Full-text available
Lenticular galaxies (S0s) represent the majority of early-type galaxies in the local Universe, but their formation channels are still poorly understood. While galaxy mergers are obvious pathways to suppress star formation and increase bulge sizes, the marked parallelism between spiral and lenticular galaxies (e.g. photometric bulge-disc coupling) s...
Research
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The 2014 LoNNe (Loss of the Night Network) intercomparison campaign is the second of four campaigns planned during EU COST Action ES1204. The goal of these campaigns is to understand systematic uncertainty inherent in observations of skyglow (light pollution). An innovation of this year’s campaign was to take measurements with many of the nstrument...
Article
Full-text available
A number of simulators have argued that major mergers can sometimes preserve discs (e.g. Springel & Hernquist 2005), but the possibility that they could explain the emergence of lenticular galaxies (S0s) has been generally neglected. In fact, observations of S0s reveal a strong structural coupling between their bulges and discs, which seems difficu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
All-sky night brightness distributions can be analyzed in a modal way using orthonormal bases such as the Zernike or Legendre polynomials. Moreover, since the power spectra of the hemispheric sky maps is in practice band-limited in the Zernike or Legendre space, it is possible to estimate a continuous all-sky night brightness map from a finite set...
Presentation
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Presentation at the IAU XXIX General Assembly about the use of ISS images for the protection of Observatories.
Article
Full-text available
Despite constituting a widespread and significant environmental change, understanding of artificial nighttime skyglow is extremely limited. Until now, published monitoring studies have been local or regional in scope, and typically of short duration. In this first major international compilation of monitoring data we answer several key questions ab...
Article
Full-text available
The Zernike power spectra of the all-sky night brightness distributions of clear and cloudy nights are computed using a modal projection approach. The results obtained in the B, V, and R Johnson-Cousins' photometric bands during a one-year campaign of observations at a light-polluted urban site show that these spectra can be described by simple pow...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, we propose an approach to estimating the amount of light wasted by being sent towards the upper hemisphere from urban areas. This is a source of light pollution. The approach is based on a predictive model that provides the fraction of light directed skywards in terms of a small set of identified explanatory variables that characteris...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Crowdcrafting RESUMEN En este momento existen más de 1.800.000 de imágenes en la base de datos del Centro Espacial Johnson procedentes de la Estación Espacial Internacional. Muchas de estas son tomas nocturnas de ciudades de todo el mundo. Su interés radica en que son imágenes de alta resolución de zonas habitadas, en las que se recogen las emision...
Article
Full-text available
Despite constituting a widespread and significant environmental change, understanding of artificial nighttime skyglow is extremely limited. Until now, published monitoring studies have been local or regional in scope, and typically of short duration. In this first major international compilation of monitoring data we answer several key questions ab...
Article
Full-text available
Images of the Earth at night are an exceptional source of human geographical data, because artificial light highlights human activity in a way that daytime scenes do not. The quality of such imagery dramatically improved in 2012 with two new spaceborne detectors. The higher resolution and precision of the data considerably expands the scope of poss...
Article
Full-text available
Despite constituting a widespread and significant environmental change, understanding of artificial nighttime skyglow is extremely limited. Until now, published monitoring studies have been local or regional in scope, and typically of short duration. In this first major international compilation of monitoring data we answer several key questions ab...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Right now there are around 1.800.000 images at the Johnson Space Center database (The Gateway of the Astronauts) and around of 1.200.000 images came from the International Space Station (date 20/02/2014). Although, the classified images are a number much smaller and there no archive of georeferenced images. There is a project to classify the day ti...
Article
Full-text available
On April 13, 2013 a very bright fireball with an absolute magnitude of −13.0 ± 0.5 was recorded over the center of Spain. This sporadic event, which was witnessed by numerous casual observers throughout the whole country, was imaged from seven meteor-observing stations operated by the Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN), and its emission spectrum was als...
Article
Full-text available
We have analysed the meteor activity associated with meteoroids of fresh dust trails of Comet 209P/LINEAR, which produced an outburst of the Camelopardalid meteor shower (IAU code #451, CAM) in 2014 May. With this aim, we have employed an array of high-sensitivity CCD video devices and spectrographs deployed at 10 meteor observing stations in Spain...
Poster
The all-sky night brightness distributions recorded at observing sites with moderate to high levels of light pollution can be efficiently described by polynomial series or relatively low order. This opens the way for estimating these continuous distributions from discrete sets of measurements made in different directions of the sky with photometric...
Article
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A citizen science project to classify night images tacken from International Space Station is discribed.
Article
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Lenticular galaxies (S0s) are more likely to host antitruncated (Type-III) stellar discs than galaxies of later Hubble types. Major mergers are popularly considered too violent mechanisms to form these breaks. We have investigated whether major mergers can result into S0-like remnants with realistic antitruncated stellar discs or not. We have analy...