Sky Brightness

Been recently measuring the brightness of a very small portion of sky a few square arcmin) using one of the meteor cameras -- in this case, USL00X -- over the course of a night.  I plan on making these measurements (clear or cloudy) for at least the next month.  Here's the messy data sofar:

The x-axis the is the number of hours since sunset.  The y-axis is the brightness in ADU which ranges from 0 to 255.  This also shows the curve for the lunar eclipse that recently happened on 16 May 2022 UTC.  That particular curve is hard to see, so I separate it out:

In any case, this is pretty cool data and I'm hoping that I'll be able to see something in this to grab on to.  What initially captured my interest was looking at sunrise and sunset (from a project I did several years ago measuring the color of the set / rise sky at different locations).

Here's a closer look at the data going up to 2 hours after sunset:

... and the two hours before sunrise:

Looking at stuff like this is part of what basic research is all about -- observation and experimentation.

It's also cool that I can correlate sky brightness with lunar rise and set, but also lunar phase!  That last one was a bit of a pleasant surprise.

As I said, the next step is to look and see if there's anything worth grabbing on to.  I'll know I've got something when I start questioning why it is that way and start hunting for an answer.