Check out Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park
Did you already have sea experience, or did you just rent a boat and gave it a try?
As someone who once worked tangentially in search and rescue, please do not even consider this. The ocean is a serious thing, doubly so at night. Unless you are renting a boat large enough to come with its own staff, please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars. And fyi, the stars at sea move as the boat you stand on moves. They are brighter, but also more blurry.
Avoiding light pollution is not really about seeing stars through light pollution. Thats for astronomers with telescopes. For human eyes it is more about being dark enough thay your iris can relax and let in more light. Try a dark forest, even a city park, surrounded by trees but able to see up. You will see more stars even if inside an urban area.
Most folks in a city likely have never been able to experience being able to walk by true starlight on a moonless night, and seeing clearly. It would be nearly impossible to get the right conditions even with a lot of effort.
A city park may be okay ish, but you’re unlikely to ever get the level of sight you’d get walking on a deserted playa in the desert. Not enough time with true darkness, and too much other light pollution.
> please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars
And over the horizon can easily be outside of cell phone range. And is definitely outside of visual range.
So it seems prudent to do a ‘don’t get yourself killed, seriously.’ Warning eh?
Without a shadow of a doubt, the interior of Australia is STAGGERINGLY the best for stargazing. It's not even close.
This was a single 8 second exposure. [1] and I'm not a great photographer. The milky way was so bright it kept me awake in my tent.
I found your description inspiring.
I remember feeling, once, that night time was when everything in the universe could be seen, and daytime was when we slept in the shade of the sun, away from it all.
We had Japanese exchange students in High School, and the teachers stayed in our house (Mum & Dad were teachers). Even though I was only ~15, I have a very strong memory of the 50, 60 and 70 year old Japanese people staying outside until all hours stargazing.
They had never seen stars before.
> They had never seen stars before.
I've been on a dark ship in the middle of the ocean and that was pretty good for stargazing, though I guess Australia might be a tiny bit better due to less reflective surface (compared to the ocean)?
Works for me (without login). I'm not sure why, it could be uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger maybe.
US 40, 6, and 50 would like a word.
They weren't connected by an interstate before that. But you said "highway". US 6 was a highway, and it ran through the exact same Glenwood Canyon.
I mean, I remember around 1968-69, before they finished building Interstate 80 up Echo Canyon, and that tiny two-lane road had to take all the commercial traffic that there was on "the main street of North America".
No it hasn't. "Highway" encompasses a lot of levels of road. If you're referring to an interstate, say so. That's the only thing that actually means that, and only that.
Those are all longer exposure, at different wavelengths, stitched together digitally.
With your bare eye in the focal point of that thing you'd just see Jupiter and some of its moons, the Rings of Saturn, some extrasolar nebulae and some galaxies better than with common amateur telesecopes. Otherwise just more and brighter stars, with some more hints of color.
You'd have more immersion by using binoculars with a wide field of view, and low magnification, like 10 to 20, maybe 30 times. But the latter with a wide field of view are rather heavy, so bring a foldable camping chair to lie down on, and some contraption to have the binoc hanging down on you, easily movable, but not shaky. Or a tripod, but they are impractical for looking straight up. (with common binocular eye-pieces)
You can still go physically, there's tours and such. But it doesn't make sense for a physicist to go there when all the imagery is captured by a computer anyway.
Also, if you've been to those altitudes you know it's not a walk in the park either!
It is because its path is closer to the Sun. So when looking towards it you are always partly looking towards the Sun.
It actually just recently (start of June) went behind the sun; it’s still too close to the sun in the sky to really be visible at all at the moment. As it moves further out from behind the sun it will start being visible in the evening sky in late July right after the sun sets, so it will be the ‘evening star’ again for the next eight months or so before it passes in front of the sun, disappearing from view for a bit, then comes back as the morning star next summer.
The stars seemed to shine 10x brighter than other places, even those without light pollution.
And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.
For the North American peeps, check out the western part of the US.
*edit: and forecasts https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/
This one is more mobile-friendly, IMO.
They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!
We have zero snakes and very few dangerous spiders and you'd have to try very hard to find them, they're rather shy.
Also, we make great coffee and beer.
That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.
That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.