Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of light pollution and its potential impact on human body. Loss of darkness during the night has a negative effect on the environment, animals, plants and humans. Concerning humans, the light during the night can lead to desynchronization of circadian rhythms with subsequent lower production of sleeping hormone called melatonin. In addition to the negative impact on organisms, there is also economical effect of wastage of lighting during the night. Pollution caused by the occurrence of light during the night is relatively new term, which has been perceived very roughly so far. That is probably the reason, why Slovak legislation deals with this problem very roughly. Some limitation levels of illuminance of billboards were stated, but the legislation doesn ́t deal with the effect of the occurrence of higly influential light during the night on people at their homes.

Abstract: How to estimate regional economic development level is important for solving regional inequality problems. Most of previous studies on regional economic development are based on the statistics collected typically in administrative units. This paper has analyzed the defects of traditional studies, and attempted to research regional economic development problems with 10-year DMSP/OLS nighttime light satellite imagery as a new data source. For exploring the relationship between DMSP/OLS nighttime light data and GDP, different types of curve fitting regression models have been tried, the Cubic model has shown the best performance with a coefficient of determination (R2) equal to 0.803. Based on this positive correlation, we have estimated provincial economic development level of China using DMSP/OLS nighttime light data. The research results have indicated that the DMSP/OLS nighttime light data can well reveal provincial economic development levels.