Gurugram Teenager Suhani Gupta Builds SkyQI Platform as Urban Light Pollution Jumps 70%

Stars have vanished from urban India. Seventeen-year-old Suhani Gupta decided to find out where they went.

Living under the bleached, amber-tinted haze of Gurugram, the Class 12 student turned ordinary smartphone snapshots into an open scientific tool. Her platform, SkyQI, estimates night-sky luminance without the bulky, prohibitively expensive Sky Quality Meters (SQMs) favored by professional observatories. But she did not stop at code. Mining a full decade of NASA orbital records across 50 Indian cities, Gupta established that median night-time artificial radiance leaped 70% between 2015 and 2025. Natural darkness across the subcontinent is vanishing at breakneck speed.

From Midnight Stargazing to Python Algorithms

Humans rarely classify artificial light as an environmental contaminant. Gupta began questioning urban skies in 2024 while tracking meteor showers at 3 a.m. for her school space society. Smoke and dust seemed the obvious culprits. Yet regular trips to visit her grandparents in Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir, revealed sharp constellations piercing ink-black skies. The air was cleaner, yes—but the absence of high-intensity municipal glare proved decisive.

She set out to engineer an accessible audit method. Her parents, both software engineers trained at BITS Pilani, guided her into foundational concepts. Her mother introduced image processing. Gupta tackled Python. When SkyQI went live in May 2025, her initial algorithmic model evaluated simple image exposure, but overcast cloud decks often mimicked light spill.

She scrapped the design. The overhaul assesses three distinct environmental benchmarks: the tally of discernable stars, the mathematical contrast between the horizon and the zenith overhead, and the aggregate background sky luminance. If a contributor uploads a picture devoid of camera metadata, the platform pulls orbital datasets to cross-check atmospheric exposure. To date, SkyQI has cataloged 1,198 night-sky photographs submitted by 490 contributors spanning 63 countries, with India generating the third-largest pool of ground observations behind the United States and China.

Space Radiance Metrics Across 50 Cities

Gupta expanded her local inquiry into an exhaustive national audit published on her platform as the India's Darkest and Brightest Cities 2026 report. Drawing directly from NASA's Black Marble archive—recorded by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the polar-orbiting Suomi-NPP satellite—she tracked radiance profiles across 2015, 2020, and 2025.

Out of 50 cities surveyed, 47 logged direct increases in upward light spill. The sharpest surges struck traditional mountain sanctuaries celebrated for astro-tourism.

SkyQI operations remain an empirical baseline rather than a certified substitute for calibrated laboratory photometers. Gupta aims to refine the image processing core against verified hardware benchmarks as submissions continue flowing in from global night-sky trackers.