Extraterrestrial Daylight

The Full Moon Theatre Project In 1991, in Gourgoubès, in the south of France, an international team of physicists, engineers, artists, musicians, writers, choreographers, dancers, film directors, television producers led by the French opera director Humbert Camerlo and the Arup engineer Peter Rice created the first open air theatre performance exclusively illuminated by the light of the moon. Thirty years later, we have recreated the Full Moon Theatre "Wonderful Laboratory" in Hooke Park in Dorset, as an opportunity to work together as a community after experiencing the isolation of the pandemic and reflect on the fragility of our ecosystem and on the impact of our design actions. The new Full Moon Theatre has incorporated, developed and built on existing research to design and construct a site-specific open air Full Moon Theatre, equipped with locally digitally fabricated moonlight reflectors. Part of the ongoing design effort is to create an online “Full Moon Library” which includes all the digital tools, documentation and techniques developed during the workshop that anyone could use to stage a Full Moon Theatre performance anywhere in the world in the future. Disclaimer: Since daylight is any or all of skylight and sunlight, arriving directly of by reflection, our lawyers assure us that moonlight does indeed qualify as daylight! Validation of Satellite-Derived Daylight Data The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) provides freely available satellite-derived radiation data covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America. The period of record is February 2004 to the present day. CAMS irradiation data are commonly used by the solar PV industry. In principle, daylight illuminance quantities can be derived from CAMS irradiation data. CAMS would therefore appear to be a potentially valuable resource for the characterisation of actually occurring daylight conditions. To test this hypothesis, illumination values derived from hourly and 15 minute CAMS irradiation data were compared against ground measurements for 610 full days across three UK locations (over four years). The evaluation will be presented in detail. The validation also examined the degree to which 15 min CAMS-derived illuminance data could reproduce 15 min daylight variability measured on the ground. Spoiler alert: the results from several of the analyses are quite startling. The validation produced several unexpected outcomes, including bringing in to question the reliability of solar data in found standardised weather files (to be discussed at a future Daylight Group event). This will be the first public presentation of results from the CAMS validation study.