Gurugram teen’s free app maps light pollution from phone photos

GURUGRAM: Whenever Class 12 student Suhani Gupta spotted more than seven stars from her balcony in Gurugram, she and her sister celebrated the rare cosmic view.

Growing up in a city where stars often vanished behind an ambient urban glow, Suhani turned her love of stargazing into a citizen-science project — SkyQI, a free platform that measures light pollution from a single smartphone photo.

Professional astronomers measure sky brightness using specialised meters that cost hundreds of dollars. Drawing on her self-taught skills in computer vision and electronics, Suhani built a tool anyone can use.

Users simply step outside at night, snap a photo of the sky above, and upload it to skyqi.in. Within seconds, the platform calculates light radiance using image processing and maps it onto the Bortle dark-sky scale, providing immediate insights on local visibility.

Suhani, a student at Amity International School, Gurugram, and Head Girl of her school, took her research further by analysing a decade of NASA satellite records spanning 50 Indian cities. Her findings revealed significant increases in artificial radiance, highlighting the urgent need for thoughtful urban design.

Light pollution, she notes, quietly disrupts human sleep cycles and harms nocturnal wildlife, apart from erasing the night sky.

As of October 2026, SkyQI has received 1,300+ sky readings from 63 countries and reached 3,600 people. Her work has been cited by The Times of India, and she has filed a patent application as sole inventor in February 2026.

Suhani is also the founder of Astrophy, an app to keep astronomy learning alive for children who cannot see stars from their rooftops, which now has over 2,400 learners across 10+ countries. She also founded Parallax, the physics society at her school.

This year, she represented Team India at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona, winning a 4th Grand Award in Physics & Astronomy.