Martin Aubé

Martin Aubé is a world leading researcher in the field of remote sensing and modeling of light pollution. He got his Ph.D. in remote sensing from U. Sherbrooke and a M.Sc. in astrophysics from U. Laval. He is a physics professor at Cégep de Sherbrooke and adjunct professor at U. Sherbrooke and at Bishops University. Prof. Aubé received the 2014 excellence in research award from the Québec's research agency, the 2013 "Raymond Gervais award" for excellence in science teaching, the International DarkSky Association 2018 Galileo award for outstanding achievements in research on light pollution over a multiple year period, and the 2019 Denise-Barbeau award for college based research from ACFAS association.

The prof Aubé's two main research axes are the numerical modeling of the light at night propagation into the environment and its remote sensing. In that context Prof. Aubé designed many new softwares and instruments.
- The main modeling tool is named Illumina. Illumina is a radiative transfer code initially designed to simulate the sky brightness according to a knowledge of the light sources on a territory and of the spatial and spectral properties of the environment (reflexion, scattering, transmission). During the last year, the model capabilities were greatly extended allowing to simulate the sky radiance under overcast conditions. But more importantly, it is now possible to simulate the direct light at night. This component of the light pollution is reaching the environment without prior scattering in the atmosphere. The two main outputs of the model are the spectral irradiance and the spectral radiance. As long as the viewing angle of a simulated observer can be defined, it is possible to simulate what a given organism should receive in terms of its spectral radiance or irradiance exposure.
- On the measuring side, prof Aubé designed many of them, each having multispectral capabilities. The first one is the SAND spectrometer, aimed to measure the hyperspectral properties of the sky radiance. The second is the CoSQM highly sensitive multispectral sensor to detect the sky brightness. Another instrument is the LANcube, a cube shaped multispectral detector designed to monitor the direct light at night in any direction. This instrument is particularly adapted for environmental and health studies. Finally, prof Aubé is desiging a new airborne remote sensing method to detect the anthropogenic light sources from the stratosphere using a stratospheric balloon from near the surface using drones. This instrument is called HABLAN. HABLAN project is developed in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency. Ultimately the HABLAN project should endup in an orbital instrument as a cubesat.