And for those of us who’re in America and who can’t skip off to Chile whenever they want, central Utah is generally regarded as the “cleanest, darkest skies in the continental US.”
You owe it to yourself to visit Natural Bridges or Canyonlands after dark, even if you aren’t into photography.
Wow! Spaceship Earth indeed.
Awesome! in the truest sense.
I want to go to there.
I had a camping trip to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Had a dark sky astronomy evening there. The stuff I saw, still in my memory, blows me away. I never thought we could possibly see so much with such dark skies. Unbelievable.
For those in the UK, I think there is somewhere in Galloway in Scotland that has been recently deemed a “dark sky” as good as many of the US spots.
Genuinely mind blowing…
Transcendentally beautiful.
All I can hear is David Bowman’s voice as he approaches the monolith.
Google Earth has light pollution maps built in now, and they are incredible:
http://www.hacastronomy.com/lp_google_earth.htm
I could kick myself for never getting into Astronomy while I lived in Arizona, and only buying a telescope once I moved back to the miserable midwest. The humidity is as bad a skyglow element as the ground light.
Many Europeans go to Tenerife on holiday, but they spend most of their time on the (frankly below average) beaches. If you go into the mountains there are some incredible views of the stars. There’s actually a law governing flight paths and light pollution from the ground, so it’s not just the distance from the mainland that makes it a good place to go.
All I can say is WOW! I just sat back and was in awe. I would love for one night to be able to see a sky like that. Beautiful doesn’t even come close to describing it. Thank you for posting it.
The Atacama is well-known for what are arguably the cleanest, darkest skies on Earth.
Some say that’s where the Top Gear guys took Viagra.
Absolutely stunning. I wish I could see or photograph skies like that.
On a related note, supposedly the Aurora Borealis will be visible from the UK tonight, though I think there’ll be too much light pollution where I am 
For what it’s worth, good night sky viewing can be had with a brief drive outside of any major metropolitan areas. Central Florida has more than enough light pollution, but 30-60 miles outside of the Orlando area that wash of light drops off enough to get some nice viewing. Besides, being outside at night in a quiet rural area is nice in and of itself.
True. New Jersey has an observatory a little over an hour outside Manhattan. If it can be done there, it can be done anywhere.
http://www.njaa.org/observatory.html
“Wow…” doesn’t even begin to describe it, but at the moment I’m too speechless for anything more…
I honestly never knew that there was any place on Earth that you could see such a sight. I know I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of the Milky Way and beautiful starscapes, but I guess I unconsciously thought they were contrived. I’ve lived in a sizable city all my life, only seeing at best 8-10 stars on any given night. My trips to my mother and grandmother’s birthplace, a small town of 3,000 or so (where they roll up the sidewalks and turn out most of the streetlights at night :P) yielded a view of hundreds of stars each night, and I was in total awe, then, but still nothing close to what is contained in the above video…
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
