Post #4473927

2026-08-10 00:29 UTC

Where is the best, most incredible, most perspective-shattering night sky that you've ever seen? For me, it was the Tekapo dark sky reserve in New Zealand a few months ago (I got up at 1am both nights I was there specifically so I could get some mostly satellite-free skies to enjoy). Second place: Mojave desert many years ago (before megaconstellations) or winter skies about an hour outside Regina, when the nights are long and there are no sunlit satellites due to geometry.

Replies (5)

@jlundell@ioc.exchange 2026-08-10 02:32

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social walking to the barn every night for the late horse feeding, Skull Valley AZ, watching the parade.

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@ambientspace@cloudisland.nz 2026-08-10 02:37

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social my astigmatism started to affect my vision in the late 80’s. I miss the clarity of star gazing as a young person under 20. I remember some epic Northern Lights during the winter of 1985 in New Hampshire.

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@dpnash@c.im 2026-08-10 01:21

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Northwestern Nebraska (Sand Hills country) in the mid-90s for one of the first annual Nebraska Star Party outings. Skies so dark you had a hard time identifying the traditional constellations, and the Milky Way was so bright it cast shadows. I got some estimates of the brightness of the faintest stars I could see there, and the site handily beat some other outstandingly dark skies I’d been to before, even including a location at the edge of the Atacama Desert I went to for a total solar eclipse the year before.

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@notthatdelta@furry.engineer 2026-08-10 02:58

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Mine was Tonga, circa 2013. At the time, there was NOTHING in the sky. Minimal development across the nation's ~170 islands. You'd see local light pollution on Tongatapu but on the half dozen other small islands I visited the stars were bright enough to forget about the tiny little refuge you were clinging to, against the miles and miles and miles of water stretching in every direction, and that just a paltry simulacrum of the endless expanse above you. You'd hold your hand up to the sky and let it drop because it eclipsed so many stars. And you'd look towards the sea and see that light mirrored endlessly in the crests of ten thousand waves racing every which way. You'd grow accustomed to noise of the water during the day - and then you'd actually *see* the source of that noise at night. And you'd smoke a cigarette, and yell into the night, and then go back inside, defeated. I love the cold and the thin mountain air, but one of my fondest nature memories was built in the heart of the ocean.

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@cafuego@misanthrope.social 2026-08-10 02:13

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social The first time was along the Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria in 1996. First time I saw the coal sack! More recently at Lake Mungo in 2020 (fairly outback Australia) and Uluru in 2024 (very outback) and then the crazy aurora in 2024 and 2025 from regional Victoria. Never in the northern hemisphere, really, although I do remember seeing pretty decent skies in the regional Netherlands in winter whilst growing up in the nineteen *mumble*ties.

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