I am looking for a site online (or a business offline) where I can purchase ‘naked eye’ (no telescope) photographs of the night sky as seen from certain geographical areas around certain dates. Specifically, I’m looking for Vancouver/Victoria BC and April 7th, 2001. I would assume that the sky doesn’t look that diferent within a reasonable radius of distance, and passage of time, so something around that location and date would be good. (It’s for a gift).
My apoplogies if this isn’t the proper forum in which to ask such a question, but the denizens of this message board all seem to be extremely capable at locating things online. I am not.
Does it have to be a photo or can it be a star map? Try downloading a demo from http://www.starrynight.com and see if maybe that will generate a sky map of what you need.
I’d say your best chance is with your local astronomy club - they’re not in the business of selling photos, but if one of their members happens to have the shot you want, he or she would probably be happy to share it if you paid them for the printing charge. Sky & Telescope magazine has a nice directory.
At most, I’ve seen photographs of portions of the sky, like a constellation or two in size. I doubt you’ll find one of the whole night sky at once, much less a whole series of them. And if you’re looking for a particular portion of the sky, then it’s not going to really matter what date or location the photograph was taken from (unless you are interested in having a planet in the shot.)
**Chas.E[/p] has the right idea here - pick up Starry Night so you see the sky from where-ever and whenever you like.
Wait a second… Wasn’t there an aurora that night? If so, your local astronomy club would be almost guaranteed to have a few such shots.
Popping on over to AltaVista, it looks like the relevant club would be the Cowichan Valley Starfinders Astronomy Club. You might try poking around that site to see if you can find any contact information. They have an image gallery, but it’s mostly telescopic.
Not for the question of where to find such a picture. Unless there are completely different sources for pictures taken at different times of night. I can just picture “The Internet’s Biggest Source of Astronomy Photographs Taken Between 12:17 and 12:35 AM”.
