I remember the last time I saw the milky way. I was at my aunt's house in the foothills of the Sierras, and late at night the dense river of stars emerges. But that is still not the true milky way, or so I hear. And, in more urban areas, the detritus of our incandescent society reduces the night sky to an inchoate glow. This article in the New Yorker talks about the poorly designed night time illumination that has resulted in our current situation, and what can be and is being done about it.
(via Slashdot)
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When Woody Allen was little, and his mother told him to clean his room, he countered that he had no room to put his stuff. So he was waiting for the universe to expand for a while, then it would be possible to clean his room.
tags: Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party, astronom
"This suggests a lack of Cepheids in the inner 2.5 kpc region of the Galactic disc except the [Nuclear Stellar Disc]." -N. Matsunaga et al.
The Zooniverse folks, hosts of the Galaxy Zoo project and other great astronomical crowd sourcing projects, has a new toy for folks to play with:
So true. The city I live in is light polluted because our former Mayor thought uplighting made buildings look cool, damn him.
I can resolve a lot more starts with my 10x50 binoculars but I wish I could see more.
I saw Comet Halley with unaided eyes at the Mars site of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert. Under those conditions, the Milky Way is gobsmacking.