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.)"

Comments

As a North Korean, I don't have that problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding an internet connection is a bit more of a challenge.

Fly past the modern-looking junky blog site

[ModernGeek]

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...

Re:Fly past the modern-looking junky blog site

[houghi]

Or just go to the page with the Google Earth image overlays for artificial night sky brightness that you can import into Google Earth and has images for the rest of the world as well.

Well, here's a screen cap of Montana

[fyngyrz]

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. ;)