But for folks not so familiar with the sky or milkyway.
The further south you go, more of the sky you can see. If you live at the north pole you see the same half of the sky all the time. If you live at the south pole, you always see the other half of the sky. If you live at the equator, you get to see the whole sky, but only half of it at any given time of the year.
Yes, the farther south you go, the better you can see the milky way.
But a more precise statement would be, the further south you go, more of the BETTER parts of the milkyway you can see and the higher in the sky they get. Now, once you are further south than the equator, you start to loose the northern most (and generally weakest) parts of the milkyway.
If you live in the southern USA, the best part of the milkyway, the center, gets high enough to see reasonably well.
As I mentioned before, if you’ve never been in a really dark sky with no moon and the milkyway out, you really owe it to yourself to search out a darker part of the USA. Make it short weekend road trip adventure and catch some of the other sights to and from home while your at it.
This is so true. I grew up in the Hollywood Hills and used to do backyard astronomy with my dad. Even though it was in the middle of the L.A. city limits, between Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and the San Fernando Valley, we could see the brighter constellations and most stars down to the third magnitude or so.
When my brother bought a house in Santa Clarita Valley, in the mid-1980s, you could still see a lot of stars at night; but then most of the surrounding area became covered with housing tracts. The newer developments generally use sulphur vapor street lighting that are horrendously light-polluting–far more so than the older mercury vapor lights. Anyway there are now virtually no stars visible from his neighborhood either, now.
But assuming you can find ideal conditions, the best time depends on your lattitude. As with so many things astronomical, observers who live in the Southern Hemisphere are–perhaps unfairly–blessed compared with us who live in Europe or North America. The thickest part of the Milky Way is in the direction of Sagittarius, for in that direction lies the center of the Galaxy. Since that is the southernmost point of the Zodiac, for us in the North it never rises any higher than about halfway up to the zenith. And the height above the horizon is what you want when you are trying to see faint objects well. The MW rises highest for us in the summertime constellations Cygnus and its neighbors, but then you’re looking out towards the edge of the galaxy, and we are already near the edge to begin with. So the MW thins out quite a bit in that part of the sky.
Sadly, the best time to see the MW can be summed up tersely as before Old Guy was even born.
Most of California is a wreck, too. The last time I tried to observe in the upper Mojave, I could only really see the sky from about 30 degrees above the horizon and higher. The rest was washed out by the lights of L.A. and San Diego suburbs.
Mind you, you can see it even from within a city. I’ve regularly seen it from the heart of Bozeman (about 30,000, plus suburbs), and on a good night you could probably see it from somewhere even bigger. You just won’t get a very good view of it, and it’s definitely far more spectacular from a truly dark location.
For best results within a city, you’ll want to be on the roof of a tallish building, with a wall around high enough (or your head low enough) that you can’t see the horizon.
Last July, my best view of the Milky Way was at the ONIZUKA CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMY, at the 9000’ level of Mauna Kea (not Mauna Loa!) in Hawaii. We went to the summit to see the sunset with the telescopes at 13,700’ and then went back down to the center for the stargazing. Absolutely the darkest skies I’ve seen in my 35 years of stargazing.
Also, remember:
“Kea” has “Keck” (telescope)
“Loa” has “Lava” (steam, smoke and other light scattering particles)
I forgot to say. Until I saw the Milky Way in proper dark skies I never really understood its name before. I knew where it had got its name but seeing it so clearly made it make more sense.
A number of years ago, I heard about a teenage girl in Harlem who had no idea that you could see the moon from the earth. She had seen pictures of the moon, but never thought of looking at the sky.
I was thinking of the back side of the Sierras as being the main exception to what I said. That, and maybe the northern third of the state, or so. When we took our train trip from Seattle to Los Angeles, we could see stars when passing through that part of the state.
A lot of these towns (like Dunsmuir) are practically unknown to most Californians, unless they’ve pondered the rail journey and looked at the Amtrak schedule.