3 ms·
This will probably sound incredibly stupid and tone deaf, but having first gotten to view the galaxy in the complete and utter darkness of the desert Southwest
by s5300 6y ago
This will probably sound incredibly stupid and tone deaf, but having first gotten to view the galaxy in the complete and utter darkness of the desert Southwest of Albuquerque (I'm from a place with pretty bad light pollution/otherwise not great star gazing) at the age of 21 (not too far back,) I had the most profound sadness for the fact that some friends who'd committed suicide in Middle/High school had never gotten to experience this singular beauty that near all of humanity that's ever been has gotten to, spare the past 100ish years. Aside from like, every other obvious reason in which them taking their own life at that age sucks... something about getting to view stars densely packed and as far stretched in any direction of the entirety of my eyesight made me terribly sore for them, personally knowing for near a fact they weren't even slightly aware of such beauties of our world.
Furthermore, you look at the statistics of the US population that lives on the coast where it's light pollution like mad, and the percentage of them who never leave a certain radius of their birthplace their entire lives...
It's a travesty how many are completely unaware of what was forever a universal beauty. I say this even having somewhat bad and aura like eyesight when looking at bright things.
Really, what got me most in my experience, was in the unbounded twinkling, I was able to spot one patch of around 10 stars that were simply... little matte dots on the blackness of the galaxy. No twinkle, sheen, or real comparative "brightness" to them, really sort of an odd thing that stood out. I presume it's a mix of relative distance and brightness put together, but I'dve liked to know the magnitude of those two conditions that was larger. Hell, maybe they've just got a bit of a dust cloud in front of them. Either way... I'm sure they have their own name and wikipedia page as a grouping somewhere. One day I'm going to try to find it.