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I think many people have never experienced and don't realize how mind-bending a clear night sky in the winter without light pollution is. You need to get pretty
by Kiro 3y ago
I think many people have never experienced and don't realize how mind-bending a clear night sky in the winter without light pollution is. You need to get pretty far from civilization but when you do you will see so many stars, colors and effects you had no idea were visible without a telescope. The first time I experienced it I couldn't believe my eyes and it redefined my perception of space.
- wickedsickeune 3y agoI've never seen it myself, but I plan to. I once showed to colleagues a photo of what can be seen by naked eye (the milky way) and they would not believe me even remotely (it wasn't super exposed).
- the_g0d_f4ther 3y agoIt’s really is an incredible experience.
- timthorn 3y agoAlso, it can be hard to navigate the sky if you're not used to it. The patterns of stars that you can see instantly in more polluted areas get a lot of "background noise" and you need to relearn the sky to a degree.
- progne 3y agoHow held back might science be in an alternate history with one change: a permanently cloudy sky. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, would all have had so much less purchase on the shape of the universe to build their theories on. So much science depends on the fundamental insights from those models. We would be a more inward focused civilization, and lesser for it.
- pphysch 3y agoCivilizational development would be radically different without celestial navigation.
- macintux 3y agoYour comment reminded me about one of Asimov's classics I'd long forgotten about: Nightfall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...
- andytruett 3y agoIt reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy's third-of-five book Life, the Universe and Everything > Krikkiters > This race of quiet, polite, charming and rather whimsical humanoids caused the most devastating war in the history of the Galaxy (with over two "grillion" casualties). Their homeworld, Krikkit, is surrounded by a black cloud, so they had no knowledge of the universe outside their world. When a spaceship crashed on the surface of Krikkit, the inhabitants quickly stripped it of its secrets and used them to create their own "flimsy piece of near-junk" craft, Krikkit One. Upon reaching the outer edge of the dust cloud and seeing the galaxy for the first time, the people of Krikkit marveled at its beauty before being gripped with fear of it and casually deciding to destroy it, famously remarking "It'll have to go." The Earth game of cricket is a racial memory of the events of the Krikkit Wars. via https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Krikkiters https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_races_and_specie...
- cratermoon 3y agoAsimov also wrote The Caves of Steel, set in a future where Humans live on Earth in completely enclosed underground cities. Robots farm and mine on the surface.
- twic 3y agoA more recent echo of this is Greg Egan's Incandescence, in which space caterpillars discover general relativity without being able to see the sky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)
- kridsdale3 3y agoThis is a significant plot element in Andy Wier's Project Hail Mary.
- dfxm12 3y agoIt's easy to understand why people looking up at this might consider it the work of the super natural.
- b2w 3y agoHaving lived on a Caribbean island, I can relate to this visual sensation. Let me only tell you further that when coupled with the auditory expeience of the rhythmic ocean waves washing against the shoreline, it amplifies the entire encounter for me.
- 1-more 3y agoOrient Point on Long Island had the same thing. Kind of shocking given how built up the whole island is.
- nologic01 3y agoAn added bonus of a dark sky is that with a good pair of eyes (and more democratically, with a set of binoculars) you can see all sort of clusters, nebulae, Jupiter's moons and e.g., Andromeda. While not as breathtaking as the panoramic view of a truly dark sky, experiencing this "micro-structure" is also a mind-expanding experience: The sky is no longer a set of random point sources. Its an organic "thing" enclosing other "things".
- marssaxman 3y agoI once got to watch the sunset from the peak of Mauna Kea. After descending to a less stressful altitude, we spent some time stargazing. I've never seen the sky like that before, or since; it felt like you could see the depth in the galaxy. I was no longer looking up at the dome of the sky, studded with stars; I was looking out, from the side of a planet, into the wide open space of the universe.
- invalidptr 3y agoI had the same experience at around 10,000 ft in the cascades. Once you're above the thickest part of the atmosphere, a whole new dimension opens up in the sky. Everywhere you look, in the space between the stars, there are more stars, infinitely receding to the edge of the universe. The sky starts to look more like a fractal than a few points of light scattered around.
- bookofjoe 3y agoAt 18,000 feet altitude on the Thorong La Pass in the Nepali Himalayas in 1984, there were more stars than darkness in between them.
- adriand 3y agoI have never been at that altitude but I had a similar experience in the Sahara a few years ago. My experience was enhanced with a little bit of Moroccan hashish. I laid on a dune and gazed at the sky and the heavens were blazing with light. I felt like I was falling into the stars. It was unforgettable. A clear sky at night is the farthest thing from dark!
- louthy 3y agoMy best experience of this was at Mt. Everest base-camp (Tibet side) at 5,364 metres (17,598 ft) Not just no light pollution, but much less atmosphere too! It looked like those long exposure images of the Milky Way. There aren't words available to describe how incredible it was. I’ll just state that it was one of the highlights of my life!
- ruined 3y agoi think one of the greatest crimes of the modern world is light pollution. it has completely redefined nearly everyone's perception of the universe and themselves in a really tragic way. we would all be better off with fewer lights on buildings, and fewer streetlights. there is no reason for most of them, and the cost is existentially incredible.
- Fnoord 3y agoWell, that depends. In general, there's no need for street lights to be on when there's no traffic. But I grew up traveling throughout my country from rural to main capital and there was always an area of the highway without street lights. That area was noticeably more dangerous because you simply see less, and have less reaction time. Especially during rain or snow or other extreme weather. It isn't just other cars. It is also deer who might pass the highway, for example. And that area was in a forest. If there were some kind of way to have them more intelligently work on/off (for example by seeing phone signals come closer) I'd wager we'd already have such. I actually dislike that premise and would like to agree with you (selfishly: I'd like my kids to grow up on a livable planet), so I hope you can prove me wrong.
- switchbak 3y agoThere was a Cadillac from 2000 that had night vision in a HUD style design [1]. That never caught on, but there's no reason we couldn't have a really great implementation of that now. I don't know if an IR emmitter would be reasonable, but that could augment the headlights to provide some really good visibility even without street lights. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIR_LzriXYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIR_LzriXYE
- FireBeyond 3y agoLarger Audis have night vision as an option: https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electronics/driver-assistant-systems/night-vision-assistant https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electroni...
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- takinola 3y agoThe first time I saw the Milky Way with my bare eyes, I almost fell over. The sky looked like static from an old TV set. There were so many stars, it was overwhelming.
- mynegation 3y agoI grew up in a small town and my wife grew up in big cities. On our trip to Morocco we were on a camping trip to a desert and she asked me looking at the night sky: “What is this huge white thing across the sky?”. Took me a while to realize that she was asking about Milky Way.
- TheFreim 3y agoI also grew up in a smallish town, it was always odd to hear visitors comment on the sky. It was just normal to see many stars, even in town. Visiting big cities at night always had an oppressive feeling to it, like having been mugged.
- nonameiguess 3y agoWhat's special about the winter? My great-grandparents on my dad's side lived in the California high desert, maybe 50 miles or so from Edward's Air Force Base, when I was a kid and we visited every year for Independence Day. A week and a half after the summer solstice and I've still never seen more stars or more of the Milky Way outer rim than I did back then.
- martyvis 3y agoHumidity. Above a desert you won't have much moisture in the air in summer.
- malux85 3y agoMe too, I was on Formentera, which is an island off the east coast of Spain, just below Ibiza. It's a small Island, only accessible by boat. One summer evening I went for a walk along the beach with my partner and we stood there in the clear night - with no light pollution, with the whole milky way above us. There were thousands and thousands of stars I had never seen before in a giant array that stretched across the whole sky. Subtle colours and brightness differences gave the milky way a structure and randomness at the same time, it was an incredibly beautiful and humbling experience, and changed my perspective of the universe too.
- gavinhoward 3y agoAs someone who grew up in a place without light pollution, I had this wonder every night. And I miss it. Growing up, I never even thought that people would not know what it's like; it was always just a part of my life. Now I live in a city...it sucks...
- freetime2 3y agoAnother important thing is to give your eyes time to fully adapt to darkness. In my experience this can take hours. The best stargazing experiences I’ve had have been camping under the open sky without a tent, where I would awake in my sleeping bag in the middle of the night and just be absolutely amazed at the stars above me.
- pvorb 3y agoI recently was on a 2000m high mountain in the Bavarian Alps during a clear night and it was truly breathtaking how many stars were visible. I grew up in the countryside where it's also very dark at night, but I haven't been out there at night for years.
- mmanfrin 3y agoMy family used to have a ranch and in college I went up there to work off a debt to my parents. I stayed in a cabin at the top of a ridge above the valley the ranch sat in. The ranch was about 7 miles outside of the nearest town, a small place of about 400 people, way up in the northeast corner of California. One moonless night I walked outside and looked up and my jaw dropped at how startlingly bright the sky was with stars. It was like a long-exposure photograph but in the highest resolution my eyes could see.
- bombcar 3y agoOne thing that always amazes me is just how much you can see on the ground in a moonless, cloudless night when you're far from anything else, especially in the desert.
- HappyDaoDude 3y agoAbsolutely! A few times I have seen the full grandeur of this on the west coast of Tasmania. Highly recommend. Also neat seeing all those satellites flying about after sunset.
- nephanth 3y agoEven in the summer I still remember the first time I saw the milky way. Can't believe I was completely unaware the sky was supposed to look like that
- globular-toast 3y agoColours? Are you sure you can really see colours? The astrophotography stuff is "enhanced" to get colours. I've been in the Namib desert in Namibia around the Orange river at night, although not during winter. There are loads of stars, but it's not colourful like the pictures and people will be underwhelmed if they have that expectation. I took a group of people who had only lived in cities into the countryside to watch a meteor shower. It was fun seeing their minds blown when there were more than like 10 stars. One thing I can't believe not everyone has seen is Andromeda. What's more is it doesn't even seem to be common knowledge that you can see it. If you're in the southern hemisphere the coalsack nebula is cool although a bit scary.
- goda90 3y agoIt won't eliminate light pollution, but something we can all do is petition our local governments to pass dark sky ordinances: https://darksky.org/resources/guides-and-how-tos/model-lighting-ordinances/ https://darksky.org/resources/guides-and-how-tos/model-light...
- EchoReflection 3y agoit's mind-blowing to think that, for ancient humans (and moderns that live in distant/"isolated" areas), every night is still like that.
- matt-attack 3y agoHow is winter helpful?