I somehow got in to hiking and camping sometime after college. While my family traveled a good amount, it was never to hike or camp or to remote areas.
On my first camping trip in the White Mountains in NH on the 3rd or 4th night I looked up and saw the Milky Way. I was blown away. At this point in my life I was an adult, with responsibilities, a healthy interest in science, and I never really put much thought in to it and I guess figured that whenever I saw starry night pictures that included the Milky Way that it was through a telescope, or an artists rendition, or something. Definitely not that you could actually see the Milky Way with your own eyes. To be honest it's insane. If you haven't seen the Milky Way with your own eyes, go.
I don't want to be too much of a killjoy, but I never understood what was all that fuss about stars.
Maybe that's because I've had the reverse experience: I grew up in a place seeing a large amount of stars, where seeing the Milky Way was just expected, and then I moved to larger cities where you can barely see the brightest stars.
Well, even though it sure is nice to see the stars when I happen to be in a darker place, I never really missed them at any point. They're a nice feature of the environment, but not something really critical, just like the bird chirps. They're nice to hear on the morning, but you barely notice when they aren't there. When I'm in a city I'm more concerned about the wasted energy revealed by light pollution, and the annoying sound of roaring cars at most hours.
I had a nearly identical "so what" thought when I went to college. I had just settled into my dorm when one of my roommates called us over to ogle some freshmen girls in short shorts somewhere walking by. They were preoccupied about it, but I had grown up in Florida near the gulf. I was honestly surprised by their interest: I had never met these young ladies and thus they were just unremarkable background people. But these guys acted like they had found an oasis in a desert. Sure they were pretty, but most girls were, right? I was informed that my opinion was incorrect and confusingly out of touch with reality.
In contrast, I once went to the Hayden planetarium and saw the galaxy for the first time. If I'm honest, I may be willing to admit I teared up more than a little. The experience utterly awestruck me, and that was merely a simulation. Bad eyesight combined with poor night vision and light pollution means I had never seen the Milky Way.
Hell, the first time I got glasses in second grade was the first time I could make out leaves on a tree! Up to that point, they were just this thing I knew was there, but I had never seen one rustling in the wind. Just some shape blobbing about. To this day, I can be content to just sit outside and watch trees sway in the wind for an hour. It honestly is just the most peaceful thing to see such detail moving all at once. A lot of people just don't understand it, as trees are about as ordinary as you can get; but to me, I remember how they used to look (and can just remove my glasses). They're rich in beauty.
TL;DR: If you lived without it, you'd be amazed how much you'll appreciate it.
That's fantastic and in some ways awful - why did it take so long to get you glasses? And I shall listen to a tree in the wind on tonight's dog walk just to remember
That's a good question, and the answer is pretty benign: I didn't know I had bad eyesight.
See, to me, it was perfectly normal to need to sit at the front of the class or to have to hunch over the paper I was learning cursive on; I remember being a bit frustrated that I couldn't understand the lessons if I wasn't close, but I was still young enough that it didn't occur to me my eyes were defective. Squinting was just how you made things clearer after all. At that age I sorta just accepted the world for the way it was. So in second grade, my teacher told my parents I may need glasses, and a while after I got some and learned just how near-sighted I was. (I'm currently about a -7 diopter.)
I've come across a few other people who had a similar experience. From what I've gathered, it seems that first and second grade teachers become attuned to kids that need glasses. As for why I didn't know earlier, I think it's just that I was a fairly introverted kid, so I didn't do a lot of sports or group play. And the only real detail oriented stuff I did was reading, and I could almost literally bury my face in that. It looked like intent reading (and it likely was), but I suspect that was just a matter of holding the book close enough. It's easy to overlook the clues, but straightforward if you're specifically trying to notice 'em.
I recently shifted to contact lenses. The one thing I really miss is going out to a park, taking off my glasses, and seeing what my brain finds in the images my very nearsighted eyes give me when I watch the trees sway in the wind.
I was informed that my opinion was incorrect and confusingly out of touch with reality.
Little did they know that what really turns some of those young women on are not so much guys with muscles and tans, as... guys who are into planetariums, the Hubble sequence, tinkering with Maxwell's equations and such; and able to explain it all, while camping in the desert on a moonless night.
:) Well I kind of lost interest in astronomy after early puberty. And when I wrote that I meant it more allegorically.
But give or take a few particulars about subject matter (and location), let's just say it's not that far off from actual experience. Which ended up being way better than anything I could have dreamt back during that time when I was being continually joshed and hassled (sometimes far from innocently) for my interests, in ways similar to what was described in the comment above mine.
Rather a shame your comment is greying out. It's not offensive, just an unpopular opinion.
For some people it's an intrinsically beautiful sight. Others, a reminder of their place in spiritual creation. To me, it's incredible that we can see such a gigantic, distant structure so clearly, in a way which gives us a tangible sense of our location in the galaxy.
The night sky is a springboard for thought: what if we lived nearer the galactic center? The sky would be bright all the time, bright as day. Likely we'd never have figured out that we live in a solar system in a galaxy; without sight of the stars and a diurnal cycle, science wouldn't have developed along the same lines. Maybe without astronomy, we'd never have ventured into the oceans. Conceivably, technological civilization would be beyond our reach. We are lucky indeed in our birthplace, for more reasons than its climate and atmosphere.
I hope that gives you some idea what the 'fuss' is about, even if it's just my perspective.
It is not about being able to "watch the stars"... it is more about experiencing and realising for a moment how tiny you are while beholding the cosmos. It is about putting things (even your whole life) into perspective...
But I have firsthand experience of the facts that:
- being able to watch the stars won't automatically make people put things into perspective
- watching the stars, while a good way to put things into perspective, isn't the only one
Stars are not a fundamental element of human life experience, just a nice but dispensable thing. Even your Youtube link doesn't show anything a human can see, and just showing a random picture of a starfield wouldn't really have much effect on most people.
Seeing plain stars only works if the people who watch them already have knowledge about them, basic understanding of the involved distances, etc. It is this knowledge that help you put things into perspective, not seeing the stars themselves.
I think the difference may be it isn't the effect on 'other people' it is the effect on 'you'.
I find it is a lot like art in that way, some pieces really move people and other people can see the same piece and say 'meh'. The trick is to understand that while the art doesn't do anything for you, it really is doing something for them.
Having raised kids and watched their interaction the "interesting" bit is that person A who is unmoved by exhibit E, imputes that person B is "making it up" when they express emotion about exhibit E. It isn't "made up" or imagined of course, but it takes a while for kids to realize that everyone's perception of the world around them is different, sometimes wildly so. Often that learning comes when they personally experience seeing meaning in something that someone else doesn't.
Once you understand that everyone sees things a bit differently you can appreciate their sense of wonder even if you don't share it.
I can't really agree on this point ... Seeing plain stars only works if the people who watch them already have knowledge about them, basic understanding of the involved distances, etc. It is this knowledge that help you put things into perspective, not seeing the stars themselves. There is ample evidence in early written accounts and from the writing of young people that without any knowledge at all about what stars "really are" they can be moved by seeing them.
>Stars are not a fundamental element of human life experience, just a nice but dispensable thing
I'd have to disagree. If the sky were a black blank slate except for the Sun (and possibly the moon to make life necessary) a great deal of our technical innovation would be significantly different. Seeing and looking at the movement of stars has had a significant impact on mathematics in the world, and the understanding of our own planet. Seeing the stars themselves (and their chemical composition) tells us a very large deal about the universe we live in.
> Stars are not a fundamental element of human life experience
Well, I disagree... You're body is composed of matter that originated in the core of "a star", so you wouldn't be able to "experience" your life without this small detail.
Another great quote by Carl Sagan is: "We are made of star stuff". And he's damn right.
I rarely get that experience of being tiny -- just as the balancing look at the fundamental particles rarely gives me the experience of being gigantic. When I look, I see a great hand reaching into the stars, humanity's hand, humanity's future destiny. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to be there too.
But hey, like, that's just my opinion, man. De gustibus non est disputandum.
I grew up in a rural area, and still live in what most would consider a rural area. So I grew up with being able to look up at the stars at night. I don't look at the stars often. But I can not imagine living somewhere that I can't because of the light pollution. But I very much prefer the sound of crickets, and owls at night to the dull roar of cars, sirens, horns, etc.
It's as major an issue as not being able to see the blue sky because of the air pollution. Sure, the light won't give you cancer, but it's still pollution that should be avoided.
There are studies that suggest that city lights increase people's risk of cancer. Sleep studies have shown that exposure to blue light suppresses melatonin [1]. Studies with lab mice have shown that melatonin suppresses tumor growth. I don't know how solid the science is on this, so take it with a grain of salt.
I grew up in the White Mountains mentioned in the post you are responding to. I am still bowled over by the stars, by the moon, any nature, really. I suggest the difference is merely that we are different people, not that where we were born formed our appreciation.
So astronomy isn't your thing, that's cool. Perhaps you'd be more moved by considering just how much energy and money are wasted to create that light pollution? That's another important part of the issue.
Experienced something similarly mind-blowing. Coming from foggy Northern Germany, I travelled to the east coast of Australia and went up the coast on a sailing boat. The night sky was so immense that I never really slept inside, instead always tried to find a place outside to spent the night watching the milky way in all its glory. Breathtaking. Every couple of minutes a falling star shot by, sometimes exploding, sometimes fizzling out. It's been more than fifteen years now and I can still clearly remember this experience and the emotions it created.
Now that this comes back, I need to go back up a mountain, leave civilization, as soon as possible.
My brother lives about 10 miles outside Flagstaff Arizona. Flagstaff has anti-light pollution laws due to the observatory there, so all the lighting in town is shielded and directed all downward. Ten miles away on the other side of mountain it's very dark indeed. Add in the elevation at 7000 feet, and the often exceptionally clear skies and there's an overwhelming amount of stars to see.
The Milky Way is so bright it always takes me time to realize that's what it actually is. And even though I'm familiar enough with constellations to use them as a sort of clock at home, I struggle to find the stars I know when I'm visiting him. There's just so many more!
The view from Mt. Everest base-camp (17,000ft) is outrageous! I have never seen anything like it and would recommend it to anyone (although I'd recommend going to Nepal and Tibet for lots of other reasons too).
As for the actual "how to do it", I'd do some the following:
* Do some research on basic gear to take (tents, water treatment, first aid, etc)
* Hit up a place like REI, Mountain Equipment Co-op or similar and load up. Make sure your boots fit - most good stores will have an incline you can jump around on to make sure your foot doesn't slip in your boot. Make sure you get the correct size of backpack, although this is not as critical as properly fitting boots. As a general rule, spendier stuff will either be tougher material or lighter, but you don't need to go nuts unless you're overburdened with cash.
* I'd start with a simple out-and-back overnight hike. If you're being careful, which you should, you'll probably have overprepared and will have a heavy pack, so a longer trip might not be fun. Over time you'll probably start to tweak what you take, get better gear and so on, and and your pack will start to get lighter. You'll also presumably find yourself getting fitter.
Backpacking is one of my favourite things to do on this earth. All your concerns with work, possessions, relationships and so on fade away, and you find yourself just focused on getting to the next camp, enjoying the wilderness and whatever company you have, finding water, and so on. It's an incredible experience.
Don't feel obliged to spend up on boots. I have done a fair number of multi-day hikes in various countries wearing a pair of low-cut hiking sneakers (Nike ACG All-Trac something) and my brother wears regular ASIC runners. Unless you're in snow/mud or a bit clumsy with your ankles, sneakers are lighter and more flexible in my experience.
And even those shoes have handled snow/etc fine for me though if you're hiking deep snow in the US it might be a different story.
There are loads of great day hikes (especially in the US) to test out things generally before you commit to a tent, camp stove, etc.
Backcountry hiking is great fun, but you don't need to hike out into the wilderness to find good darkness. You can instead visit an astronomy club on their way to a "dark site". Look that up and see if you can find one near you. They are usually not more than a few hours drive away, although if you are on the east coast it make take more travel time.
Or just get in your car, drive until you are really far away from anywhere, pull over, and look up. Then go find a motel.
Start doing research about gear you will need for backpacking and where to go near you. State parks are great places to backpack. It took my SO and I about 3 months from initial research to take our first trip. I absolutely love it and also go several times a year now.
Just remember to take it slow! Always better to be over prepared than underprepared. Mother nature is not forgiving.
This is good advice. Start slow (short trips, close to civilization) and build up over time. Your experience will tell you what gear you need much better than any review site.
One of the best places to actually START is just Google up a local park, grab a water bottle and do an out-and-back (e.g walk 15 minutes along the trail and then turn around and retrace your footsteps back to the trailhead.) You can do this over lunch.
Great advice, especially with starting with super short trips. One of the most important things is clothing and these short trips will let you figure out a good set of shoes, how to layer clothes etc, without putting you at risk of being shivering cold with blistered feet in the middle of no where.
I had a similar experience. I grew up in the country and always took the clear sky sans light pollution for granted. I lived in the city for a few years for college and then work and then came back to the country to visit old friends. I was driving back to my parents old place one night and stopped and got out of my car in the middle of nowhere. I looked up and was blown away.
I had the same experience while on a trip out near Uluru some years ago. Camping out in the middle of nowhere, looked up and.... wow. Never seen anything like it, and at this point in my life I conceivably won't again.
It's worth pointing out that light pollution doesn't mean you can't enjoy the stars. After 20 years living in cities and forgetting much of the sky I loved as a country child, I moved from the heart of Manhattan - a 'white' area in this map (http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/overlay/dark.html) - to a suburb half an hour away which is colored red.
In the city, I could see Jupiter clearly, and three moons through an ordinary pair of 12x36 binoculars from my 19th floor apartment window. With a very tired $40 yard sale 4" Newtonian refractor I could see bands on the planet on a winter's night. With the naked eye, the Summer Triangle, Capella, Sirius, and a few other very bright stars. None of it all that impressive from a quick glance upwards, but still stuff there to study with conscious effort.
Out in my new back yard, the view is breathtaking by comparison. On a very clear night with dark-adapted eyes there is just the hint of the Milky Way. On a normal night, the Pleiades are clear. The Andromeda galaxy is lovely through binoculars. But the real treat is the constellations - gorgeous and vivid, separated, teachable to my children.
I've been up Mauna Kea and nothing on earth can compare to that, but as an everyday treat, a bit of mythological theatre wheeling in the sky on a dark night, or even an evening's worth of nebula hunting, I'm blown away by my heavily light polluted back garden.
The light pollution map isn't very good and it doesn't give the full picture. We do astroimaging in the middle of a very bright area, but we are on a hill. A little elevation goes a long way. It also helps that our scopes are in an enclosure which blocks lights from the sides. We can occassionally see the Milky Way on clearer nights.
At my new house on a hill, you can see a huge difference being on the deck versus being down (about 50 feet) in the back yard.
People who are really interested in doing some viewing should check out local astronomy organizations. They will host star parties and will know the best places locally to do observations.
The only street light within half a mile is about 1300 feet away and about 150 feet down even from the backyard. It may have more to do with the neighbors than anything else - on the deck I am next to or above all neighbors with my (darkened) house blocking light from the neighbors up the hill. The closest neighbors have few windows on the side of the house facing me.
It is quite a deck, but the backyard is a couple flights of stairs down from the backdoor which itself is on the bottom floor of the house.
yeah, apparently my favorite star-watching location (on the roof of my grandparents' cabin in the shadow of Thorodin mountain, near Nederland, CO) is yellow in this map. But at 9200 feet and with mountains and trees blocking direct light from all directions, the sky is just as clear as my other favorite star-watching place (Beecher Island battleground, in one of those completely unshaded regions on the Colorado-Kansas border.)
Light pollution only has an impact on observing "faint fuzzies" - galaxies, nebulae, and other objects that are, well, faint and distant. It has essentially no impact on bright things such as almost anything within the Solar System, most of the nearby stars, some star clusters, etc.
The other big problem for astronomy, seeing (or air turbulence) is exactly backwards. It's the main enemy of seeing planets or other high resolution targets, but it has no impact on faint fuzzies, because your eye can't see much detail on those anyway.
This is why from my backyard, in one of the most light-polluted places on Earth, I can observe planets just fine. However, nebulae, or even the outline of the Milky Way, are difficult or impossible to see.
Living in the city, light pollution drives me a little bit crazy. I don't understand why so many people seem to be OK with losing our ability to see the stars... It also implies squandered electricity (and money).
When I stayed with my mom for a week in NYC, I was shocked by how bright the sky at night was. Literally it glowed orange. I felt like I was in the D'ni caverns from Myst, and it really wore on me. My best guess is that one just stops looking up after a while. Or, as a sibling comment notes, you look down at the city as your new sky.
Cities can take on a sort of self-importance, an introspective ego, anyhow, since there's so much available that you can be permanently distracted from looking outward or upward. Can't say it wasn't a fun place, but it's not my cuppa joe. But I could easily imagine a [native?] city dweller feeling like they're not missing anything.
[EDIT: I guess I just figure some people live in the city because it gives them everything they need. But it certainly made me feel like I lost my sky. I'd be curious to know if you grew up in the city; so far, it seems like that feeling of loss or wrongness is just for people who grew up outside them.]
I grew up in a very small town and I used to sit very long periods under the stars doing nothing. It was kind of meditation. I moved to the city when I went to uni and started missing it more and more; you hardly could see anything there and it didn't give me the same rest sitting outside. A while ago I looked for a new place to live after the city and I picked that place specifically based on viewing stars as one of the highest priorities on my list. I live in a village deep in the mountains; there is no light in the village at night, there are no cities nearby and the rest is shielded by the mountains. If you have never seen something like this you definitely are missing something worthwhile and yes, I can see the milky way, almost every night.
This is in the mountains in the south of Spain. The village I live in has 40 people and they kill the streetlights after 11 pm and the nearest 'big' village has 200 people and they kill almost all the lights as well but I cannot see that anyway even if there would be enough light.
> I don't understand why so many people seem to be OK with losing our ability to see the stars
Honest question: why shouldn't they be okay with it?
I was a Boy Scout and I saw the stars at night during camp outs. I've seen the night's sky from the middle of the New Mexico desert. It was very pretty, but I've seen it.
It's not that I don't have a sense of wonder. Heck, I'm a post-doctoral researcher in physics and I've been trying to teach myself cosmology as a hobby. Yet, from my perspective, being able to see the stars every night like being able to see Niagara Falls every night. It's something that you should certainly do once and I don't begrudge those who want it part of their daily life, but I don't think that it needs to be the default option.
You seem to disagree, so I'm wondering what it is that I'm missing.
Well, seeing the stars everywhere at night is the default and our activities are preventing it. So I don't think it's quite the same as seeing Niagara Falls. Light pollution is a solved problem and solving it has other potential benefits (like better sleep at night).
But no one cares. Why don't they care? I don't know. For me, the inability to see the stars at night is like not being able to see the sun during the day. It's like every night is cloudy.
Well, not everyone is going to have the same level of awe or interest for any given phenomenon, obviously. It just strikes me as kind of sad that so many people today live their lives without even realizing what'd be visible directly overhead if only it wasn't so obscured by light pollution. At least you do realize, and have seen it.
I think it's unfair to kids in particular that they're missing out on this. (I realize there are worse "accident of birth" things to worry about, like safety and shelter and having enough to eat, but I'm trying to stay on-topic.)
I don't know... not being able to see the stars strikes me as one or two steps away from living underground, or never looking up.
Because Niagara Falls is thousands of miles away, fixed in size and in one place. The sky is everywhere and infinite. That we can't see the sky is a far more singular deal.
It's grounding and humbling. I look up at the stars every single time I'm outside at night, even just walking from the car in the driveway to the front door. The scale and history is unfathomable. I never get sick of it. I think about past generations from thousands of years ago and how at that time they would be lying around a fire and what they would've been thinking.
That opportunity to look up and see stars should be a natural night state for us and our children.
Unless they're aiming that 100% LED street lighting where it won't wind up in the sky, I don't see how that'd make a difference. And street lighting isn't the sole source of light pollution - in many cities, buildings are lit from the outside at night with big floodlights pointing upwards. I'd imagine that has a fairly big effect on light pollution.
Fwiw many cities are switching to fully shielded led street lights. They started doing this where I live (Cincinnati) and the change has been fairly drastic.
If you're purchasing outdoor area or street LED lighting from any reputable OEM, they will comply with Dark Sky-friendly BUG (Backlight/Uplight/Glare) ratings.
Are the color pictures over exposed? I have seen the Milky Way lots of times (and quite clearly), but it always looked more like an almost gray cloud... I've never seen the kind of bright colors that are usually shown on pictures.
These pictures usually get taken at 15-30 secs with a very fast lens (f2.8) and an ISO of 1600-6400. You need a pretty dark sky or a lot of post processing. Within 50-100 miles of
the background is just brown.
If you have a camera with manual control, give it a try. You need a wide angle lens, otherwise you'll get star trails quickly.
If the author is referring to the galactic center being in view, then wouldn't that depend on whether it's summer in the northern hemisphere, or the southern hemisphere? After all, each hemisphere's summer is looking the opposite direction.
If the author is simply referring to the season, well I'd think the winter - having longer nights, colder atmosphere, and, at some latitudes, having nights period - would lead to darker skies and better viewing.
The data hasn't been updated since 2006 but the change should not be that much different. I've contacted the author in the past, for some technical explanation:
The NOAA data is the light source data. It uses the light source data as input to a model of light propagation in the atmosphere to estimate the light pollution.
This takes into account that the light pollution from a town or city (or natural gas field!) can affect the level of light pollution at locations far removed from the light source.
Technically, my light pollution atlas is the amount of artificial sky brightness at zenith.
The site features also an overlay on Google Maps which shows the light pollution. It's a nice tool to find night photo spots. The one I've been using for some time with great results: http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/overlay/dark.html
What I don't like with these shots is that they show an unrealistic picture of what the milky way would look like - the human eye can't detect colour like that. They are beautiful shots but if your intention is to show what it's like if the lights were out, its misleading.
And actually, wouldn't nearly _everything_ you see be the Milky Way galaxy? That's not the point of the site, but struck me just now. I had the same experience you did, while backpacking in New Mexico. The sky was outrageous - I had never seen the whole of the structure.
Yes, pretty much everything visible to the naked eye is going to be the Milky Way. There are a few deep sky objects like the Andromeda Galaxy that you can see from a reasonably dark site though, if your eyesight is good and you know right where to look. (It's pretty easy to find with binoculars but with the naked eye it will just be a small, faint, diffuse glow that doesn't look particularly interesting, assuming you can see it at all.)
In an absolutely trivial sense, the earth, and everything on it, is part of the Milky Way. All that light pollution is light from the [0]Milky Way reflecting off the [1]Milky Way and thereby obscuring the [2]Milky Way from the [3]Milky Way.
Sorry to sound silly, but I've only seen real milky way in Americas, but never in Asia. It's a common knowledge to me that you can see it, but it doesn't quite match the reality for me.
Where the text discusses the origin of the term "Milky Way", I wish they would give the Greek name γαλαξίας κύκλος (at least in transliteration) rather than only giving the translation 'milky circle'. (The text does give the original Latin "via lactea").
I remember when the term γαλαξία was referenced in an amazing conlang puzzle which led to a series of events culminating in my awareness that γαλαξίας is ancient Greek for 'galaxy' (sort of), whereas γαλαξία is ancient Greek for 'milkshake' (sort of).
The server error on this page is a great example of how to build negative brand recognition. Hint to hosting companies: your error pages aren't a good place from which to link to your sign up page.
Just came back from a remote location in Cuba. Go out on a clear night, look at the sky for about 2-5 minutes to get your eyes adjusted, and enjoy the density of the milky way before you.
One thing I learned while getting into astronomy is that full dark adaptation can take up to 25 minutes. Some will use an eye patch to keep their observing eye dark adapted (this may also be the reason that we associate pirates with an eye patch, to facilitate seeing above and below deck)
If you live in the Bay Area (South or East Bay), an easy to reach Dark Sky location is Henry Coe State Park near Gilroy. Doing an overnight camping there is incredible. You can spent all night gazing at the Milky Way. It was really amazing seeing the Milky Way again since my younger days. Try to choose a night that is close to a new/no moon night.
For those of you in the Bay Area that want to come out to the sticks a little bit, SVAS (Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society) has a pretty nice observing site in the Sierras. (check web site, contact somebody to get in as a guest) Midnight in August provides a very nice view of the Milky Way.
Andromeda looks pretty good (bright) through some of the large scopes that people bring up there, as well. (magnification is fairly trivial, you need a large telescope to get brightness)
Looking at the light pollution map [1]. There is a band of light between San Antonio and Corpus Christi that does not follow the cities/roads where you would except to see light.
I saw the same thing. I've looked at the "earth lights" pictures for years, and you can pick out cities and the basic highway grid ... so those cloudy patches in North Dakota and southwestern Texas stand out.
He he, those cloudy patches are what keeps OPEC up at night.
Ah yes you are right. I had figured this was the case but was not sure. You can look at this map of the Eagle Ford Shale and it matches up almost perfectly.
I've always wondered this but have never had it answered. If we're in the Milky Way, isn't it safe to assume that 95% of the stars we can easily see are part of the Milky Way.
Basically, how can you NOT see the Milky Way, assuming you don't have some sort of ridiculous light pollution blocking all visibility?
I'm confused how exactly the dates were chosen in the section "Where can i see the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth?" They don't appear correlated to the moon phases calendar.
If you mean subtracting out all the stars in our entire galaxy, then the night sky would get a lot dimmer. We'd only see the starlight from distant galaxies and the planets of our own solar system. If you mean just the streak across the sky that is the densest part of our galaxy, then there'd just be fainter and more distant stars in our galaxy to take its place. Regardless, it's very hard to know for sure because we reside in the Milky Way and can't see past it.
I somehow got in to hiking and camping sometime after college. While my family traveled a good amount, it was never to hike or camp or to remote areas.
On my first camping trip in the White Mountains in NH on the 3rd or 4th night I looked up and saw the Milky Way. I was blown away. At this point in my life I was an adult, with responsibilities, a healthy interest in science, and I never really put much thought in to it and I guess figured that whenever I saw starry night pictures that included the Milky Way that it was through a telescope, or an artists rendition, or something. Definitely not that you could actually see the Milky Way with your own eyes. To be honest it's insane. If you haven't seen the Milky Way with your own eyes, go.