Post #4475264

2026-08-10 01:21 UTC

@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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@dpnash@c.im 2026-08-10 02:39

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social Specific example: I’d been doing amateur astronomy actively as a hobby for about a decade by then, and was quite comfortable finding my way around the sky without a reference, even in ultra dark skies with too many stars to count. One night at that particular star party, I found myself looking at a bright star that I couldn’t quite identify. It took me a minute or so to realize that I was looking at Polaris. The sky was *so* dark that the stars of the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor) were almost completely swamped by dozens of other stars nearby that are completely invisible from the city and even not readily visible from “ordinary” dark sites. You’d think the stars of the Little Dipper (though kind of dim by overall star brightness standards) would be bright enough to be clear under such a dark sky. From a kind of, sort of, dark sky, sure, that’s what you experience—but from there, they were literally swamped almost beyond recognition. The kind of sky where you almost feel you need to hold onto something because you feel like you’ll float off and drown in the stars if you’re not careful.

Open ##4475262