The project

Street Spectra

Street Spectra is a citizen science project to map and characterize public lighting sources. Volunteers use a low cost diffraction grating on top of their smartphones’ camera to take pictures of the street lamps and their emission spectra.

The creation of the project has been motivated by the global switch out of the older street lighting to new LEDs. A database is gathered at Epicollect5 and classification is done at Zooniverse. The results of both actions will allow scientist to study the effects of this change on technology onto light pollution.

Enjoy taking your own amazing pictures of spectra. It's for science!

Get your diffraction grating

To participate, volunteers should use a 500 lines/mm diffraction grating on top of their smartphones’ camera to take pictures of the street lamps and their emission spectra.

A diffraction grating is an optical component with a periodic structure that splits and diffracts light into several beams travelling in different directions so the emerging coloration is a form of structural coloration associated to any light source.

They can be bought online in places such as Edmund Optics, Jeulin, AliExpress, Amazon Spain, Amazon UK & Amazon DE.

We are using Epicollect5 to collect the data and Zooniverse to classify the spectra

Download Epicollect5 on your phone

Help classifying with Zooniverse

Go lamppost hunting!

 Add your pictures to Epicollect5

All the pictures are gatherer at our epicollect5 project. We are open data. Feel free to upload your own and download others!

Check amazing pictures!

Help classifying at our Zooniverse project

Zooniverse is home to our citizen science project as the images allow street lamps classification by comparison with example pictures of well known lighting systems.

Spanish & English

Read the manual for more information

Participating in Street spectra is easy and fun, but you may need some more information at some point time. Please keep in had the manual with all the details of the project.

Our team
Jaime Zamorano

Professor of Astrophysics

Rafael González

Telecommunication Engineer

Esteban González

Computer Engineer

Lucía García

Physicist

Carlos Tapia

Optical Technician

Street Spectra is part of ACTION project

Check Out Other Projects!

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 824603.

jzamorano@fis.ucm.es