That's a bit of an exaggeration. I often go to some place in a rural area in mainland France, very close to the sea. Night skies are beautiful and I can clearly see the milky way at times. The two closest big city are 46 miles (75 km) south or 70 miles north (115 km). But there's very little pollution: one of the reason is that it's a very sparsely populated sea side (there are vineyards and that's about it) and the other reason is the closest highway is a 45 minutes drive.
> Even in perfect conditions the milky way will never look like the hyper-saturated versions that a camera can capture
I agree with that!
If you haven't had that experience it may be that you've never been to a truly dark site (there is essentially none in the US east of the mississippi) and there is a big difference between kinda dark and really dark, or perhaps because you haven't at the time of year where the MW was extremely high in the sky at the middle of astronomical night or you had pollution from a non-new moon in the sky.
Being able to barely see the MW is what I would describe as the condition under optimal conditions in northern Marin County CA. Which is is urban area and not especially dark but Marian County prohibits outdoor advertising, so it's much better than most places of similar density. Unfortunately even in the last two years the sky brightness has become worse for me.
But you can absolutely appreciate seeing the plane of our galaxy from, say, the Australian countryside, outside of the big cities.
And the shadows cast by Venus and Jupiter on a boat and their lines of light on the water. That was close to the Withsundays.
Sadly this is based on age. Younger people can usually see the red and purple colors in the Milky Way. Once you are close to thirty, this ability seems to go away.
[1] "Fundamental Chromaticity Diagram with Physiological Axes - Part 1" (I'm unclear on CIE copyright, so no link, sorry), section 5.6.
It matches my (and a bunch of others’) experience though, for what it’s worth.
You know all those comparisons pre-and-post-photoshop for models? Its same for those over-processed night shots (or generally any way over-processed shots, which most milky way shots are) I turn away in disgust. I understand folks who don't know much about this like it, but once you know what actually comes out of full frame sensor in 25s exposure (even if stacked) there is no way back.
Most pros do this too simply because it sells well to those who don't know better.
The difference is that ridiculous amount over-processing, literally re-painting parts of picture ie to add more contrast to milky way. Once you know what goes inside making of such a picture, as a photographer you can't have much respect there, I know I can't.
Its same as celebrities with unnaturally smooth plasticky skin - when you know how they look like in real life even with tons of makeup, those shots over-processed on top of that look just cheap and bad taste.
Next you will have a disdain for JWST, becuase we do not see IR.
It'll be gone soon, though. All these blue LED street lights are a scourge.
But it turns out in most cases the town/city just decide to keep spending nearly the same amount on electricity, and put in brighter LED lights. So now they have a little less electricity being used, and much more light.
Some cities will do trial runs, and ask for feedback from the community. And, people being people, in nearly all cases they will say they prefer the brighter streetlights. So again, we end up with brighter lights.
Hundreds of miles from the closest megacity maybe. You could go a couple miles out of a small rural town and see a brilliant milky way.
They don't look anything like those photos with their strange bright blue and yellow skies though of course, or any terrestrial features lit up like daylight like this! It's all pretty black.
Not at all. Maybe hundreds of miles from a large city? I'm not even sure about that, but I know you can see the Milky Way fifty miles from a city of tens of thousands.
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info
Clicking on your location/vicinity shows a tooltip with your "Bortle Dark Sky Scale" number, which can be referenced here:
https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/bortle.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale
Apparently I've lived in a class 6 or 7 my whole life, and only recall seeing shooting stars camping out in the Sierras, e.g. Yosemite, which is still only a class 2!
Even in perfect conditions the milky way will never look like the hyper-saturated versions that a camera can capture, because our experience of the night sky is mostly monochromatic.