Here are the entries. Make your pick and post them here.

1. Bortle’s Livestock Scale measures an animal’s height and weight and calculates BMI; results are used to adjust feed.

2. Bortle’s Electronic Scale is an electronic version of the spring scale, which uses a strain gauge with length-sensitive electrical resistance. It was named after Sir Thomas Bortle, a physicist from England.

3. In full, Bortle’s Double Harmonic minor scale. A musical scale used by composer Johan Bortle in his “Hungarian Gypsy Dances” work.

4. Bortle’s Antilogarithmic Scale calculates the difference between exact spacing and logarithmic spacing.

5. Bortle’s Luminosity Scale tests the overall candlepower of street lamps and the ilk.

6. Bortle’s Dark Scale measures the blackness of the sky above certain geographic areas.

7. Bortle’s Smoot Scale: an arbitrary unit of measure based on the height of former MIT student Philip Smoot, who was rolled end over end across the bridge between Boston and Cambridge as a class project.

8. Bortle’s Star Scale was a means of assessing screen star popularity in the 1940s, invented by Editor Philip Bortles of Silver Screen magazine. It compared the ratio of movie houses showing
a specific star’s movie to those who were not and assigned a “Star Rating.” It fell into disuse when actors became independents, in the ‘50s.

Oh. So THAT'S how it was supposed to be done!
Well, I blew it. Anyhow, I'll guess #1

hmm, tough choice! I'll try #6

#4 for me.

Hapless hops on the Scale of old Bortle!
He may zap you then roll you with a chortle
Some get cursed by the darkness
Others yanked by their harness
One got beamed up through some stellar portal

I'll try 6.

OK, the guesses seem to have fizzled. The correct answer was number six. Bortle's scale assigns a number from one to ten for every geographic area based on how dark the sky is at night. It helps astonomers determine where the best place to site optical telescopes would be.
The daffys came from
1 Bethree5
2 Kalleh
3 Arnie
4 Geoff
5 Bea
6 The correct one
7 - 8 My own daffys
A smoot, by the way, is an actual measurement and the story behind it is as accurate as my own poor mind can recall.

A double harmonic minor scale does exist and some gypsy music uses it. No Bortles were harmed in the making of the scale.

A fun game! thanks, Proof.

My book club's recent read was "Nothing to Envy", a non-fiction that reads like a set of interlocking stories. The frontispiece contains a satellite photo of the area in the '90's, where N Korea is a completely dark area bordered by China, Russia, and S Korea. (After the Iron Curtain fell & Russia stopped providing ballast for NK's failed economy, the power plants all shut down). I guess they would have a pretty high Bortle's score...

A great word, too, proof. Thanks!

Who's up next with a word?