That is probably the thing that irks me about where I live now. In town, you can see maybe 15 stars at night, and there's not a place in the county where you can see the Milky Way.
Out in the hills of Southern Illinois there are still a few places, bu they're getting fewer and further between by the day.
Damned if I know what to do about it except enjoy those rare power outages...
My father (professional turned amateur astronomer - he built an observatory in my parents' backyard in upstate NY) keeps a slingshot around, ostensibly to threaten streetlights, but he's intrinsically law-abiding, so I can't say whether it ever gets any use...
Driving between towns in the U.P. in the middle of the night gave us a lot of really nice night skies. Sadly, I was almost always too busy driving to really appreciate them.
When I was out at Penn State, we had a pretty nice view of the night sky, relatively speaking. State College puts out a modest amount of light, but other than the town itself, there's really no major source of light for two hundred miles or so.
I'm sure there are plenty of places in the country you can go to see the Milky Way. They're just not near where anyone lives, for obvious reasons. I bet Montana has a nice view.
Canada probably has some great places too, since about ten people live there once you go west of Ontario or east of British Columbia. I think it's just Dal and a few lumberjacks.
Sure, the Milky Way is visible, in some sense, from any moderately dark place. I'm sure you can pick it out easily from the Grand Canyon, even though it will be fainter than Les Vegas' light dome.
But being "able" to see it and being able to really appreciate it are very different. Like the article says, you need an exceedingly dark place to get an understanding of what our ancestors were looking at for tens of thousands of years.
And, even though there are places one can go to see a dark sky, very few people ever really do. I'd imagine *most* Americans have never even seen more than a couple hundred stars at a time. I wish everybody could see a good sky every night instead of needing to travel out of their way for it...
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Out in the hills of Southern Illinois there are still a few places, bu they're getting fewer and further between by the day.
Damned if I know what to do about it except enjoy those rare power outages...
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She says it not-entirely-in jest, and to be honest, 40 miles out from NYC isn't far enough.
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I'm sure there are plenty of places in the country you can go to see the Milky Way. They're just not near where anyone lives, for obvious reasons. I bet Montana has a nice view.
Canada probably has some great places too, since about ten people live there once you go west of Ontario or east of British Columbia. I think it's just Dal and a few lumberjacks.
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But being "able" to see it and being able to really appreciate it are very different. Like the article says, you need an exceedingly dark place to get an understanding of what our ancestors were looking at for tens of thousands of years.
And, even though there are places one can go to see a dark sky, very few people ever really do. I'd imagine *most* Americans have never even seen more than a couple hundred stars at a time. I wish everybody could see a good sky every night instead of needing to travel out of their way for it...
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Still, Colorado Springs made its presence known on the horizon...
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