Light Pollution

[den]

I hope the people who were blacked out went outside that night and looked up. There are stars up there! I never realized how bad light pollution is until my trips to the UK in the 80s. A dozen bright stars and light-haze is not a night sky.

Comments

No such luck...

[blaisepascal]

It was very humid here, plus a full moon. So the sky was very hazy, even without light polution (so poor seeing, in general) and the entire sky had a heavy glow from the moon.

It's a shame, since I tried to go look while it was blacked out.

I did go camping for a week at the end of July, and I know how bad the light polution is. My favorate open globular cluster is the Pliedies, which are sometimes hard to see with the light polution. (Hmm, are the Seven Sisters visible from Australia?)

Re: No such luck...

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

They are indeed visible! There's even an Aboriginal story about them. I can often pick out most of Pegasus and Andromeda way off to the north, and if I'm in the flat country to the west on exceptionally clear nights at the right time of the year I can even see one of the stars of Ursa Major. It's the star furthest from the Pole Star.