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How To Find Nearby Dark Skies, No Matter Where You Are
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "For those of us living in or around large cities — and that's most of us — we're completely divorced from dark, clear night skies as part of our routine experience. But even though our skies may typically rate a seven or higher on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale, that doesn't mean that significantly darker skies aren't accessible. Here's how to install an interactive light pollution map for yourself, and find the darkest skies near you no matter where you are! (North American-centric, but resources are provided for those elsewhere in the world.)"
Finding an internet connection is a bit more of a challenge.
No thanks.
Here is the real site with the actual map: http://www.jshine.net/astronom... I love how the most modern looking sites with all the share, like, and tracking code embedded into them have the least amount of information...
Sig: I stole this sig.
I grew up in the Northeast Corridor (severely light-polluted), but for over 10 years have been on the "Big Island" of Hawaii and for almost 10 years, on Mauna Kea, so I'm used to 1-3 on the scale. Now I'm looking at moving back to be closer to family... hope I can find somewhere not TOO lit up.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
When (if) you look at this, note the huge mess over in North Dakota. That's largely gas burn-off from oil wells. Luckily, I"m far enough west of them that I still have actual dark skies (little green plus marker, top right) but I think we're at severe risk of suffering the same light insult as them before too much longer.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Been shooting so as to take advantage of it while I can, examples:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/... ...and...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/... ...that's all camera work, btw, no telescopes, though I do have some moderately long lenses. ;)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
OK this is tangentially on topic, especially if you're talking about cool map tricks.
There are many individual groups holding related events throughout my state, however attempts to create a shared calendar for them have not had all the features we'd like. We've tried shared Google Calender, Wordpress plugins, etc, and none have had all the features we'd like. We'd also like to avoid existing large sites like Meetup, as we'd like to only have our own events displayed on the Calender/Map. And we want to make sure individual organizers have full control over their own event's calender and can link to an existing Google Calender/iCalender. Ideally this could be ramped up for larger than state usage, but for now we're trying to replace a myriad of individual calenders spread all over the place, and a single Google Calender that attempts to gather them in being maintained by one person.
An example: Magic the Gathering has many individual groups and stores running events, with many individual organizers. Ideally the Calender/Map system would be able to pull in many individual calenders and display them in a shared Calender/Map with filtering by City, Region, and even by Event Sub Type such as Game Type, Ranked Games, etc. It should hopefully be embeddable on any other website and provide it's own (filterable) export in standard calender formats.
Any help is appreciated!
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Everyone that has ever been on Hogan's Heroes is dead.
n/t
Just go up, eventually there will be no atmosphere to disrupt your star viewing.
Here is a more up to date version:
http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/
With a better map:
http://djlorenz.github.io/astronomy/lp2006/overlay/dark.html
It's not something I often think of (life is busy, right?), but it was neat loading up this layer into Google Earth and tracking down approximately where I've been when I've seen those night skies.
I can make it to a Class 3 in 1h20m, Class 2 in 2h20m, and Class 1 in 3h40m. I'd never really thought about it like that before; that's really not so hard to do! :)
Now I can't stop thinking about The Fixx "Red Skies"
Looking at the map in the UK, the vast majority of England is coded yellow or worse (5.6 - 6.0 - suburban sky). In some places you can can get green coded (6.1 - 6.5 - suburban / rural transition), and there's only four areas coded blue (6.6 - 7.0, rural), which are along the border with Scotland, a chunk of Cornwall, a very small bit of the North Norfolk coast at Wells-next-the-sea, and a bit at the border with Wales. Wales in general fares better with some proper dark places through the central and western of the country, as does Scotland in the highlands and along the border with England. Northern Ireland has a few spots of 'blue' in the north and southwest of the country.
Anyway, for me a it's a little disappointing - It'd be many hours drive to get to anywhere rated 'blue' or darker, and over an hour to get to the only place in the whole of the southeast rated 'green'.
If you make the .png transparent then you can just view it on google maps throgh docs. I have done this for northern Europe.
Ha! An 8 or 9 corresponds to a VLM of 4 - 4.5. That's not a "city sky" - that's open country in most, errr ... developed countries. If you want a city sky try a VLM of 0 or 1 - where there are more lights from planes than stars or planets visible.
Oh, and having a dark sky is nice, but meaningless if there's cloud cover. A much more useful tool would be a Google Maps overlay for the number of clear nights per year.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
My daughter loves science and the new Cosmos. This is a perfect tool to plan with for an upcoming warm summer night.
Trolling is a art,
A simple (but unfortunately short) list is provided at the following site. Rumor has it these parks actually enforce rules. If you show up with a flashlifght, you will be escorted off the premises. Support your nearest dark sky state park!
http://www.darksky.org/night-s...
If you look at the light map, there seems to be a fairly clear line almost halfway in the middle of the US. I couldn't find a natural barrier. The Mississippi is to the east, and the Rockies to the west. But it looks to me that it's pretty much the exact eastern half of the the US is bright almost everywhere, and the western half, except for the cities, is pretty dark. It's curious to me that the line is pretty straight, north to south. Is there a reason for this other than an accident of history?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
They're unreadable without a tablet.
With the gradual encroachment of around-the-clock bright light everywhere, you don't realize what you're losing.
Last time I went to a planetarium show, they did the standard slow-dimming-background thing, until you could see the equivalent of magnitude 5. "Ah", I thought, "this is what I remember dark skies looking like. It's a shame I have to drive an hour to see them now."
Then we heard the voice of the narrator: "This is what most people see at night today. Now, we'll show you what a truly dark sky looks like..."
...and the bottom fell out of the sky.
The number of stars multiplied at least tenfold. I still literally start to tear up when I think about it. Because I do remember, now, seeing skies like that when I was much younger; but with ubiquitous "safety" lighting, and my aging eyes, I doubt I'll ever see them again.
I have an uncle who owns a sheep station and (if all the house lights are turned off) the sky in that area is AMAZING. Its clear most of the time too (although I wish they had more rain, they really need it).
I hope to get back there sometime and stay with them again sometime and photography is something I intend to do if I do get out there (although I have no clue how well my little canon point & shoot would do with night sky photography).
> "on theBortle Dark Sky Scale"
Oh come on man, that sounds like something they made up for Ghostbusters.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you're in North America, you can ask for a 48 hour forecast of clouds for astronomers for that nice dark spot you found. Check out cleardarksky.com, or the website of your nearby astronomy club.
When I first moved out to the desert, nights there were DARK. And a moonless sky was lit up end to end -- you don't realise what an impressive swath the Milky Way makes if you haven't seen it like this. There's actually enough starlight to cast shadows. Visitors from the city would stand there gawking, having no idea it looked like that.
Civilization encroached, a gaggle of streetlamps went up a few miles away, and my wondrous night sky vanished into the ambient haze. And even tho the new lights were about 6 miles away, I no longer had to carry a flashlight when I needed to muck about outdoors after dark. It was that much brighter... enough to mask probably 80% of the visible stars.
It's not quite dead dark where I now live in the middle of nowhere, less because of the occasional rural yard light than because of a power station a few miles downriver that makes a signficant glow atop the intervening hills. But it's still a helluva lot better than what they did to my desert.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?