As a kid, I remember seeing what I recall as a proper night sky, with lots and lots of stars and the milky way, while camping in various state parks in the midwest. Was I getting the real deal, like pre-industrial people would have seen? Or do I need to head further into the sticks? If so, assuming I live in, say, the middle of Ohio, which direction should I travel? Northern Michigan looks pretty empty, is that good enough?
Find where you are on this, and how dark you want to get!
Fascinating! Thank you for the resource.
Awesome! Thank you!
Come to my house. Bring beer.
I’ve seen the Milky Way even in places that are colored orange on that map. It helps to have a wall around you that blocks the horizon to about ten degrees.
That’s still no comparison to what you can get from a really dark site, though. The dark gray areas on that map, you can’t even imagine until you see them.
Portland, Maine isn’t that big of a city but I remember when I worked on an island about 3-4 miles off the city’s coast(I was a gardener/trail worker at a summer camp and lived on the island all summer.) I could see many more stars at night then at my house in Portland.
My experience is that to get really dark skies requires at least 100mi from a big city. As an example, I took this photo of the Milky Way around 10 miles east of Naples, Fl. The orange glow is Miami, which is around 70 miles away:
With all due respect, it is difficult for me to imagine any set of conditions on this planet when the naked eye would be able to see bright orange clouds and so many stars, and at the same time, and with such a fine border between them. Two questions: (1) About how long before sunrise was this photo taken? (2) How long was the shutter exposure on the camera?
(I almost asked how long after sunset it was taken, but then I saw that Miami is east of Naples.)
Both pieces of data are right there on Flickr, on the right under “additional info”, thanks to the magic of Exif. The answers are 1) July 23, 2009, at 21:56:12 local time, and sunset was 20:16 in Naples on that day, so about an hour and half after sunset, and 2) 30 seconds. Also, it was apparently taken with a Nikon D90 and edited in Photoshop CS4 on a Mac two days after it was taken.
Thanks, BorgHunter. I’m impressed!
You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, naked eye, in many parts of Southern Utah. I could see the Milky Way from my front yard, in the middle of town, in Moab Utah.
What direction to go, from any big light-polluted city? Answer: UP.
Up into the mountains.
When I was a juvenile goat, in Los Angeles area (late 1950’s, early 1960’s) the family went to the mountain resort of Big Bear several times a year, up on top of the San Bernardino Mountains. The area is much more built up today, but perhaps still has some night sky. We had a cabin in an area several miles outside of the little touristy resort town there.
To watch stars at night, even there, you have to sit out in the night darkness for a while, for your eyes to become night-ready. Even at first, there are way more stars than you’ll ever see in a city. But after a while, you begin to see more and more, and the whole sky sort of turns into a misty-looking haze — that’s simply the whole skyfull of stars that you didn’t see at first. The cloud-like Milky Way becomes even more visible as this happens.
After watching carefully for a while, you might even notice some stars that are slowly . . . moving! :eek: Those are satellites. We always made a game of seeing who would be able to spot them.
You can actually do a lot of stargazing even in populated areas. When Mr. Athena and I lived about 40 miles north of Denver, we did a fair bit of astronomy in our backyard. Once we moved to da UP, our first house was about 1/2 mile from downtown, but the way it was situated, there was a dark area on the driveway and Mr. Athena did some kickass observing there as well.
Nowadays, we live farther from downtown, but our yard has a lot of trees. The astronomy isn’t nearly as good here, though it’s probably darker than either of our other two houses.
So yeah, Northern Michigan is dark, but Northern Michigan also has a lot of trees.
Unless you live in the middle of a huge city, I’m guessing you can find some good viewing around where you live. Most places have local astronomy clubs; contact them, they’ll tell you which parks/fields/areas are the places to go. You really don’t have to get THAT dark to be able to see a lot of stuff.
Like BosWash.
the problem with stargazing in a place like Ohio is the visibility range. And that would be between 3 and 10 miles generally. If you went out west into the desert that would increase to something like 150 miles.
BTW, I don’t if anybody reading this thread has done this but I often go out at night and watch satellites go by. It has to be about an hour past sunset so that they reflect the sun back to you but it’s fun to spot them. The space station of course being the most spectacular.
I’ve never specifically sought out satellites, but if you’re out stargazing on a decent night you’re sure to see a few of them. I’ve probably seen the ISS a dozen times or so.
The ISS is the third brightest object in the sky, after the sun and moon.
If you want to find out when it will be over your area in the US, search here.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States
Far out to sea, probably.
The two best places I’ve been for stargazing:
Mesa Verde National Park. The top of the mesa is vaguely bowl-shaped, so you have an effect that cuts off light from the horizon. Still, there is human activity all over the mesa (including campgrounds).
Some highway I don’t remember between Colorado Springs and the Grand Canyon. We drove it both ways; there’s a long stretch of nothing – not even cows – where you can go for hours with the only sign of human alteration to the natural landscape being the highway itself and a snow fence running alongside it. Every once in a great while there’s a hut for storing road sand/salt. It’s really a vast stretch of unoccupied and gorgeously barren, gently rolling terrain. We saw few cars and worried about running out of gas.
On the way back, we came through at night. In the middle of that place almost beyond the reach of Man, I realized that an eclipse of the moon was underway. We’d been traveling and not paid any attention to the news, so seeing it happen was how we found out.
We pulled over, turned off the car lights, and fell upward into the awesomeness for a while.
The Southwest is an excellent choice. Chaco Canyon is far from any sort of city light interference. The night sky is amazing there.