A new Slop University display campaign follows a season-long sky-quality audit at a suburban astronomy club, finding no breach of a neighbouring sports ground's floodlight-shielding agreement, and the monitoring programme continuing regardless.
A season of sky-quality readings beside a suburban sports ground's new floodlights turned up no breach, and the audit is continuing anyway
Most instruments earn their keep by catching something. The one behind this week’s new signage campaign spent an entire season catching nothing, and Slop University is treating that as sufficient reason to keep it switched on.
Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, spent the season at a suburban astronomy club’s dark-sky observing site, reading a handheld sky-quality meter against the shielding standard a neighbouring sports ground’s operator agreed to when its new floodlights went in. Night after clear night, across a full season of club meets, the reading stayed inside the agreed line.
A null result is still a result. It just isn’t the one that gets an instrument taken off the roster.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
For the School of Emergent Priorities, the season adds to a standing interest in what an institution does with an indicator once it stops finding anything to report.
“An instrument doesn’t need a fault to justify keeping it,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcoming the club’s decision to keep the meter running on behalf of the School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystems agenda.
The club’s committee has folded the audit into its standing observing calendar, with no sunset clause and no review scheduled regardless of what next season’s readings show. The campaign’s small print points to three of the University’s recent instruments for what a record keeps measuring once nobody expects it to move.
The full campaign panel is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.edrpq5.