[celpgoescheeew]

First off its always nice to see researchers using infrastructure based in Kiel. Makes me a bit proud! But why can't the articles author give numbers instead of word salad descriptions like one droplet in three litres... For light. The amount, intensity or what?

[paulmooreparks]

In the paragraph right above the one you reference:

> Beneath that ice, the light sensors recorded an astronomically small number of photons: an upper range of 0.04 micromoles per square meter per second, a number very close to the theoretical minimum amount of light that photosynthesis can run on. The actual amount of light was probably lower.

[magicalhippo]

It's not a direct conversion it seems, but assuming daylight then 0.04 umol/s/m^2 should be around 2 lux.

I was curious how this compared to being on Pluto, but apparently Pluto gets a lot more sunlight than I imagined[1]:

So at high noon on Pluto you’d get at least 60 lux of sunlight.

Civil twilight is roughly enough light to read by, and that’s 3.4 lux. Moonlight is less than 0.3 lux.

60 lux would be comparable to indoor lighting in a hall or stairway.

[1]: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/03/09/could-you-read-on-...

[flobosg]

The linked study presents details in a more technical format.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Yeah, PpFF (Photons per Football Field) are much easier to understand, especially if you have to divided them equally between a family of Base4.

For the Metric Heads, we here in Australia use the SI unit Photons per Olympic Swimming Pool, which unit of measure is the Centiquantalap, naturally.

Edit to add: Under the modern US customary measurement system, 1 drop is 1/72th of a US customary fluid dram, and 793 and 1000 conveniently have no common factors, so it should be self evident that 3 litres is 793/1000th of a US fluid gallon. Converting that to lux or lumens is left as an exercise for the reader.