Just last week I spent a few days in the mountains of central Afghanistan and at night there was no light (I mean none). I had never seen a sky with so many stars, it really was amazing.
The vivid, colorful things you see in the background on science fiction shows are usually Hubble photographs, which are all in the public domain. They are real things, but in reality they take up a much smaller space in the sky, such that you’d never notice them without a telescope, and a lot of the features are only visible in a long-duration exposure no matter how good your telescope is.
As long as we’re talking “amazing stuff Hubble can see”, y’all might be interested in my very favorite Hubble image: the Ultra Deep Field.
Basically, they pointed the Hubble at an apparently empty patch of space and left the aperture open for three months. What came in was the tiny, almost imperceptible light of thousands of galaxies, too distant to be seen, from the very farthest and oldest reaches of space. Every little pinpoint of light in that picture is another galaxy. It seems that, even in the emptiest parts of the universe, there’s something wonderful to be seen.
Yes, one clear night in March, in the foothills of the Himalays in the mid-90s when there was zero electric lighting for many many miles around, I saw “the universe” for the first time. It took my breath away, and reduced several of my party to tears. You could practically read a book by the light of the Milky Way.
I also heard a meteor that night.
Back in the old days (i.e., when I was a kid), if you were a city dweller and wanted to know what a real starry sky looked like, you could see a planetarium show. Nowadays, though, it seems like the folks who create planetarium shows think that just simulating the night sky isn’t snazzy enough… they add all these special effects, ending up with what seem to me like glorified slide shows… the planetarium never gets dark enough to really create the sense of a night sky, you’re just sitting in a big room with a domed ceiling looking at pretty pictures. And I wish those damn kids would get off my lawn.
I have to admit, the thought that someone could take a photo like that from an * inflatable * kayak had me going :dubious:. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were using one of the new digital cameras with 25000 ISO and stacking images, but the meteor made that theory implausible. It probably took 1/25 - 1/4 second for that streak to occur, and there’s no conceivable way that a photo taken from a floating object would have no movement artifacts over that period of time.
Nice photoshop job, though. I wish it looked like that out there.
Not to mention the ripples in the water.
While I agree the picture is Photoshop in action, the above doesn’t necessarily give it away as such. I didn’t interpret the picture as being taken from inside a floating canoe, necessarily. It could have easily been from land, including just a bit of the docked canoe in the frame.
I think whether the photo is “faked” or not is kinda beside the point.
The real question IMO is can/does the sky look like that ? Does it really matter if the exposure was 1/60 a second or 30 minutes ? And again, IMO it can look fairly close to that with the naked eye.
Maybe the photo inthe OP was taken from a stable position, like on the shore, with the canoe in the lower portion of the pic?
No way.
I’ve been to some really dark-sky places, and the Milky Way never looks like more than a faint smudge across the sky. It’s just not very bright.
Here’s a photo I took around 80 miles from Miami - note how bright the skyglow is even that far away. This was a 30 second exposure at ISO 640
Well, you havent been to really dark places then. I think the glowing miami taking up half the frame might be part of your problem.
Here is a map to help folks find dark observing sights.
http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/
Note that way offshore is dark gray, as dark as you can get. The next darkest is light gray. Then a light blue, then a darker blue. Then a green and so on and so on.
You really don’t even start to get a decent view of the milky way until you are in a dark blue / green zone, and thats only if the dark blue / green zone is pretty big and has no yellow, orange, or red zones close by.
Light blue, with nothing nearby except perhaps some darker blue and green, and it starts to look pretty darn nice.
Light gray, with only blue nearby, and any green or higher FAR away, and then the Milkyway can be spectacular.
You’ll note that there are virtually no places left in Florida that are gonna get you much past the darn nice level. Even just decent view levels are hard to come by. Most of Florida is actually craptacular for Milkyway viewing.
I’ve played around much in southern/western Alabama, where WHOLE counties are at the light gray or light blue level and anything much brighter than that is 30 to 60 miles or more away. THATS when you can see some good shit.
I have 80 Acres approximately marked by the star in this map. The skies are pretty dark - some of the least light-polluted in the US. The Milky Way still doesn’t look like more than a faint band in the sky. I’ve also camped at the Grand Canyon, which is in the darkest band on your map. Same thing.
All I can say then is that either you have no idea of how to become really dark adapted, no idea of what the definition of bright is, or have some pretty poor vision (in which case my condolences).
You’ve got handful of posters here that proclaim the stunning beauty of the Milky Way when seen from a good dark sight. You think we are all making this up ?
I dont know ANY real amateur astronomers that would describe the Milkway as nothing more than a faint band in the sky.
beowulff, you must just have had bad luck. The Milky Way is massively bright and breathtaking when you see it from the right conditions: to the naked eye it appears pretty similar to the time-exposed pictures linked in this thread, albeit without such color depth.
If you say so…
I think the color depth is the primary thing people are referring to when they say it doesn’t actually look like that, though.
And for the record, it’s possible to see the Milky Way even from the middle of a (small) city, if you’re higher than most of the surrounding buildings and you’ve got a lightproof fence around you. You’ll get a much better view from the middle of nowhere, of course, but you can still see it.
Count me as another person saying, even from the darkest of dark-sky locations (middle of Iceland, African bush etc), the Milky Way never looks anything like as bright as in those long-exposure pictures. Yes, it’s spectacular, but it doesn’t light up the sky like daylight like some of those pics suggest!
Uhh, thats why they call the night the night and daylight daylight.
At least you used the word spectacular and did not use the words faint band/smudge.