Well, and let us not forget Krikkit (Life, the Universe and Everything).
Another reason that we see a uniform distribution of stars is that the interstellar medium isn’t completely transparent. Many of the brightest, more distant stars look dimmer than than they should because of absorption by intervening dust. There are a bunch of really bright stars in Cygnus that we would see easily with the naked eye but we don’t because of dust clouds in that region. So we don’t really see a representative selection of the stars in the galaxy, mostly just the closer, middle-brightness ones.
On a cloudless night here in Vermont, the Milky Way is quite striking.
Apart from the Milky Way, the stars do look a lot like that. When I look up around here at night, I see some stars, and can make out the constellations pretty easily. If I go somewhere “dark”, I can see more stars, and I can make out constellations with dimmer stars more easily (e.g. some of the little dipper stars are fairly dim).
Driving in New Mexico in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere (the highway that runs near the Trinity sight), I stopped and got out of the car to look at the sky, and it was hard to make out the constellations, there were so many stars.
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:
Yes. The Milky Way is BRIGHT, folks! It’s a measure of how bad light pollution has become that so many people think of it as faint.
Indeed. It’s a significant and largely unremarked change that today only a limited number of people have ever seen what not long ago was seen by every human every week: the full splendor of the night sky.
The best today is probably from far out to sea on a clear night. As ZenBeam notes, it becomes difficult to pick out familiar constellations. If the odd cloud drifts by, it shows as a black patch against a bright background.
Um, no. If the Milky Way looked that bright and detailed to the naked eye, it wouldn’t be called the Milky Way. Those images are the result of exposures of about 30 seconds at an ISO four or five times what is normally used, and maybe some editing to accentuate the details. Even under ideal conditions, a milky cloud is the best that we can see it as.
Yep. For me, growing up and living in Chicago, you have to go quite a bit afield before you can see the clear sky. I was 18, visiting my cousins in Tasmania, when I first looked up into a night sky and realized why it’s called the Milky Way. I mean, it was jaw-droppingly breathtaking. First of all, the foreign-to-me Southern Hemisphere sky was interesting, but second of of all, I just could not believe how much stuff was just out there. Not only was there a big wash of stars splitting the sky, there were colors up there, too. And it’s not like I hadn’t traveled in the US. We’ve done many road trips but, apparently, never stayed far enough afield to get that kind of sky. Here in the Chicago area, I’m lucky at night if I see dozens of stars. Off in the middle of Wisconsin or Upper Peninsula Michigan, which seemed rural to me, I still only saw maybe thousands of stars. In Tasmanian, the stars just looked uncountable. I had no idea you could see that many stars.
And you know that how, exactly? Have you ever seen the Milky Way under a sky that’s not light polluted?
I have. It’s bright (especially the summer Milky Way, which is what most people photograph). It has noticeable structure, structure you can see clearly with the naked eye. The Great Rift is obvious. Many of the larger open clusters and globular clusters associated with the summer Milky Way can be spotted with the naked eye
It is NOT a faint, amorphous band of light. If you don’t believe me, go to a truly dark sky site (hint: there are none east of the Mississippi River, and only a very few out in the western US) and see it for yourself.
For the edification of urban and suburban Dopers: The Bortle Scale. Note the characteristics described for a Bortle Class 1 sky (no light pollution whatsoever). The summer Milky Way is bright enough to cast SHADOWS, folks! (And that’s not an exaggeration, I’ve seen it.)
Bortle Class 1 and Class 2 skies are now vanishingly rare in most developed countries. Most of you have never seen skies that dark. Do yourself a favor and plan a road trip or a sea voyage out to one of the places such skies can still be found, and see the night sky as it’s meant to be seen. You’ll never forget the sight!
I’ve stood in the middle of the BWCA and Quetico Provincial Park (Northern MN and Canada border area). Yeah, the stars are bright. Until you’ve been that far from civilization, you never really grasp how bright city lights are and what they do to the night sky.
We’re not in the center of the disk, but we’re not way out on the edge, either. If you look in any direction in the plane of the Galaxy, you’ll see the Milky Way. The other portions aren’t quite as spectacular as the core, but it forms a continual band all the way around the sky.
@ artemis,
It’s impressive in darker skies, to be sure, but not nearly as bright and detailed as in those images, which was Alan Smithee’s question. I see the Milky Way regularly in rural Saskatchewan, which is about as rural as rural gets, and I’ve seen it many times on canoe trips in the remote northern wilderness where there isn’t a single artificial light, let alone a village, within a hundred miles. There is some structure to it, but it has never been close to what those images look like. A 30-second exposure at high ISO far exceeds the light-gathering capability of the human eye in real time.
I don’t know. Those pictures look very much how I remember the sky looking. Not as apparently bright, but just as populated. That was my feeling of “holy shit, I could see all the stars.” The only other place I’ve been like that was somewhere in Bosnia (which also seems to be a Class 1 or Class 2 Bortle Scale location.) Like artemis says, the sky is bright enough to cast shadows. What’s especially weird is to realize just how damned bright the moon is (when I was in Tasmania, I was there for a whole month, so got to go through the whole lunar cycle. I mean, it was really weird to be so mesmerized and dumbfounded by something so “normal.”)
Hey, if it’s bright enough for the dung beetle, it’s bright enough for us!
@ pulykamell
Yeah, the biggest difference I notice in a dark sky is the sheer number of stars I can see. I’m still gobsmacked by it when I haven’t seen it for a while. Like others have said, it’s hard to pick out the constellations among so many stars. But concerning the Milky Way, all I’m saying is that it’s brighter but not to the point where you can distinguish fine details in the dust clouds. Good images of the Milky Way are impressive to me precisely because they show much more than what I see with my eyes.
Lucky for them that they only need a dim band of light like we can see, and don’t need to take high quality photographs of it to find their way.
My recollection, from some amazing dark-sky regions in the mountains of New Mexico, is maybe a little closer to yours. The milky way was bright but not quite so sharp, and definitely not that colorful.
I think it has something to do with rods vs cones in your eyes. Your cones are responsible for color vision and higher resolution. Rods are much more sensitive but cannot discriminate color, and don’t have the same resolution. Best rod density is in the near periphery, maybe 10-15° off center. You can resolve finer details if you look slightly to the side of the feature you’re interested in. It takes a bit of practice, because your instinct is to look directly at something, but if you do that it’ll completely disappear. (I’ve had some practice at this with faint chemiluminescence reactions in a proper dark room.)
My memory could certainly be enhancing the experience. But, other than the sheer number of stars, what I remember the most is the gaseous fields of color. I just didn’t realize the night time sky had actual color in it. It probably wasn’t as colorful as the first two pictures, but closer to the third. I didn’t realize, until then, that you can actually see those ethereal swirls with the naked eye. Weird to have been on this planet for almost two decades at that time and not have seen the sky as it was meant to be seen.