I’ve had this floating around in a folder for awhile now, and apparently I had forgotten to post it. Read on to find the true secret of the sky.
The estimable xkcd, of course.
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What’s really up there
I’ve had this floating around in a folder for awhile now, and apparently I had forgotten to post it. Read on to find the true secret of the sky.
The estimable xkcd, of course.
6 replies on “What’s really up there”
And the true secret is?
That last picture is just a joke right? Can’t say that I have ever viewed that in a really dark sky with my F4 16″ Newtonian.
Well, yes, yes it is a joke (but it was believed for hundreds of years). Where I live, frame #3 is the norm (but in color, more like the feature image). I’d love to have your scope here.
Whew! Thought maybe my eyepieces needed cleaning! LOL
I don’t have quite as dark a sky in the Poconos but pretty close. However, each year I take my pop-up out to Cherry Springs in central PA for a four night star party. That is supposed to be the best dark sky site in the East. Viewing is best in the West though.
I guess I’m spoilt, but as far as I know there IS no viewing east of the Mississippi.
This is why:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/North_America_night.jpg
If you identify Spokane (first big bright area straight east from Puget Sound, and about a 1/4 of the way east to the big blotch where they are flaring off gases in the oil fields, which is itself about 1/3 of the way east to Pennsylvania), and Boise (next bright area SSE from Spokane), drawing a line from north to south you go through two identical towns close together, e/w (Pullman WA and Moscow ID), and then further south is a patch slightly bigger than the two of them together (Lewiston, ID), and then a big dark patch, and then Boise — I’m in the middle of the big dark patch.
FWIW, I use that image to help teach my grandkids to be able to recognize cities in North America without a map. The skills will eventually help them find their way around the night sky, also.
If you have GoogleEarth (not the web page map) on your computer, you can turn this on as a layer under Layers->Gallery->NASA->Earth City Lights. It’s a good resource for predicting viewing, especially if you add in altitude.
https://billwhittlecom.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cherry.jpg
(the above is an experiment to see if I can put images on this site and reference them in a comment — it worked for me, but I don’t know if others can see it)
I remember skies like frame 3 when I was growing up in predominantly rural South Carolina. Now the small town I grew up near, 10 miles away from, lights up my south-eastern skies, Columbia washes out my south-western skies, and the Charlotte-Rock Hill metroplex, even at 70 miles away, lays waste to my northern skies. I was an amateur astronomer as a kid, now that is hardly an option for anyone on the on the East Coast
Take a look at the images I added to my reply, above. We haven’t had satellites long enough to do a time lapse, unfortunately.