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I've lived in or visited both urban (New York City suburbs) to rural (Machu Piccu) areas and oddly enough, the urban skies are washed out with light pollution but in rural areas, and especially Peru's Andes, the skies are starkly clear, the stars shine with a brilliant sparkle that I've never seen anywhere else, and the Milky Way was a veritable river of sparkling stars. As a kid growing up we'd have power blackouts in the city, occasionally giving us a glimpse of the heavens and a treat for what lie in the skies when I spent some of my summers at sleepaway camp. Science class gave me introductions to the brilliant points of light in the sky, some were stars, some were entire galaxies, and some where planets. My view of the night sky was firmly anchored in reality. That all changed in the Winter of 1977, though when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. I'd seen Star Wars earlier that same year, it was a fantastic movie, of course- but Close Encounters, to my 12 or so year old mind, brought the prospect of the world of Science Fiction, a previously accepted as "fake", as in- doesn't exist in the real world, and never will- but Close Encounters teased the possibility, not the reality mind you, but the possibility- that one of those brilliant dots of light out there just may possible contain beings who right now may be contemplating us down some long, high-tech telescope. Does that mean I believe that all the stories and tales of UFOs are real? No, not at all. It DOES mean I can dream. When I look up at the night sky I see galaxies, I see constellations and stars, nebulae and planets- I see vastness, and I feel small in that eternity. But I also feel comfort, as if simply acknowledging the beauty of the night sky by looking up and appreciating it is enough thanks from me, to the vault of stars for it's being. I had the fantastic opportunity to see the recent eclipse live, and it was truly awe-inspiring. Definitely the most unique and incredible sky event of my lifetime, I encourage anyone who can to see it at your next possible chance. Do you take the time to gaze up the stars? |
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Sep 18, 2017 20:40
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| # ? May 5, 2024 17:36 |
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https://twitter.com/ayolookatthesky/status/637165273754132480 |
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Sep 18, 2017 21:34
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Me, looking up at the stars at night:
https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4 |
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Sep 18, 2017 21:47
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Here's what I think op: ,"woah cool..." |
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Sep 18, 2017 22:26
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Splatmaster posted:I've lived in or visited both urban (New York City suburbs) to rural (Machu Piccu) areas and oddly enough, the urban skies are washed out with light pollution but in rural areas, and especially Peru's Andes, the skies are starkly clear, the stars shine with a brilliant sparkle that I've never seen anywhere else, and the Milky Way was a veritable river of sparkling stars. i spent the first 17 years of my life in rural Southern Arkansas. I had a steeply slanted roof with a chimney... i remember several times when i was very young that my grandmother and i would go up and sit at the crook of the chimney gazing at the stars and looking for constellations. when i was 20, i met the girl who would eventually become my wife... on our second date, we ended the night at a public park, laying on top of a jungle gym and watching the stars. that was 11 years ago, and she still makes fun of me for asking "where' when she jokingly called a plane a "moving star" since it didn't move as fast as a shooting star. so, 31 years in arkansas looking at a perfectly clear, beautiful sky. i moved to NYC. it is definitely different here... i wouldn't call it 'washed out with polluion,' but the lights from buildings, lamp posts, signs, etc. does have an effect. i do agree that it detracts a bit from the actual sky itself, but all in all i just think of it as different. still lovely, just not in the same way. my past is littered with fond memories of the rural sky, but i'm forming new ones with my 1 and 2-year olds looking at the city skyline and continuous energy it represents. it isn't quite as relaxed as what i'm used to, but they enjoy it, so i am growing to love it. ----- |
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Sep 20, 2017 16:04
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Falling cows.
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Sep 20, 2017 16:25
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Meeksha posted:i spent the first 17 years of my life in rural Southern Arkansas. I had a steeply slanted roof with a chimney... i remember several times when i was very young that my grandmother and i would go up and sit at the crook of the chimney gazing at the stars and looking for constellations. when i was 20, i met the girl who would eventually become my wife... on our second date, we ended the night at a public park, laying on top of a jungle gym and watching the stars. that was 11 years ago, and she still makes fun of me for asking "where' when she jokingly called a plane a "moving star" since it didn't move as fast as a shooting star. Thank you for sharing this  Robot Made of Meat posted:Falling cows. We're gonna need a bigger umbrella https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4 |
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Sep 20, 2017 16:29
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I think of the night sky in the High Desert of California, near Palm Springs. Words cannot do justice to how amazing the night sky is there. I'm in a much more light polluted area these days, but I always think of seeing that awesome milky way stretching from horizon to horizon, even when I can't see poo poo
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Sep 20, 2017 17:15
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It's staggering, beautiful, and almost unimaginable. Just looking at a quiet, dark sky fills me with a strange solemn feeling, tinged with almost madness at how vast our universe is. Something I think about a lot is the way light travels in our universe.  I think this diagram is the easiest way to talk about it. This visualizes a single event, emitting or absorbing light, in that intersection marked 'observer'. Time is the vertical, with the bottom being the past and the top being the future. front/back and left/right are spatial dimensions; matter and light can move along those. The cones represent of all events the event may have been influenced by or that they have a capability of influencing in the future; a cookie-cutter section of the universe. Light can only travel along the surface of the cone, straight toward the future. It can't slow down, accelerate, or change trajectory. It travels at a constant velocity. Matter can't even reach the surface of the cone. It always takes longer to reach something in the same amount of time; as it travels further faster it pushes closer to the boundaries of this cone, reaching near the surface (approaching the speed of light), but no matter how fast it goes it still will always cover slightly less ground than light in the same time. You can't ever catch up with light. As soon as it is emitted, it is going to go where it is going to go, and the causal relationship between the emission and the absorption will not be affected by anything else. If you shine a flashlight off into space, you can't catch up with it. You can't warn anyone to get out of the way. You are now completely separate from the future of that light in every possible way; the best you could possibly do is arrive shortly after wherever it was going to go and apologize for shining a light in their eyes, but no information about the event can possibly get to the end result beforehand. This is a fundamental consequence of relativity: light has no proper time, and travels no distance. The emission and absorption of light is essentially an instantaneous event, a reaction between a particle and the matter it is zero distance from. From the surface of the cone, your eyes are effectively touching a (small) portion of that star, just in a way where the interaction is thankfully very limited and harmless from our reference frame. Events are consistent for any given relative speed in our universe, and if you could get a warning off or have people block the light, there would be a fundamental difference in what happened from one reference frame compared to another. It sounds like just a poetic way of putting it, but it's actually entirely accurate. You can't catch up to light because whatever is happening to that light is set in stone. You can't warn anybody. Events will continue to unroll exactly like they would with zero information of that approaching photon until it gets there, and then it gets there from our perspective, but on emission it was directly interacting with something which to us was the distant future. I know the stars will be there when I go out as we have forewarning about it, as they've shined for so long and we expect the grand majority to shine for a lot longer. Still, to get to be the endpoint of such a process is an amazing thing, even if you only are seeing the barest shred of output from a furnace emanating so much energy in every direction, a single point source of unimaginable power. If you've never been lucky enough to observe a truly dark sky, I hope you'll give it a shot and head out to the nearest location near you and spend some time stargazing. Pick a day where there's no moon and check http://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html. One of the best I've seen was on the summit of Mauna Kea on the big island, I still get shivers thinking about it, it was just crazy how full the sky was, impossible to pick out any constellation really, it was just a mess of stars. |
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Sep 20, 2017 20:41
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joke_explainer posted:It's staggering, beautiful, and almost unimaginable. Just looking at a quiet, dark sky fills me with a strange solemn feeling, tinged with almost madness at how vast our universe is. Thank you sharing all of this cosmic awesomeness, joke_explainer! The incredible distances that photons from distant stars have to traverse means in some cases the very stars we see at night have long since died- so basically when we gaze upon the night skies we are seeing the ghosts of stars long dead. How many of those same stars contained civilizations? The night sky is a journey far back in time. Take a journey, all you have to do is look up, when the sun sets. I hope you see something awesome, if you do. https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4 |
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Sep 20, 2017 23:44
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I live in the country, and even though I lived in only a very small city previously, I can attest that we out here have a LOT more stars. Sitting out on the deck with a dog and a tasty beverage on a cloudless summer evening is a wonderful thing.
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Sep 20, 2017 23:51
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The stars are really undead motherfuckers and if I could shoot 'em in the brain I would. My .22 has never put a star out yit. Longin' for the day I can afford a niiiice ol' piece that'll gently caress those bitches up. You know that fuckin' light is coming to ya long after the freakin' star is dead? poo poo's hosed. If'n god had a lick of sense he'd have a candle snuffer for when the lights run out 'nstead of jist letting 'em keep on shining for drat years after they're dead. Worlds already in a freakin' zombie 'pocalypse and y'all aint doing poo poo about it, well, I am. Vote for me 2020. Let's turn off the lights in their dead eyes.
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Sep 21, 2017 01:17
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| I think of the emptiness and temporality of all things and the strange fact of a consciousness that can observe that emptiness while being empty itself. | |
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Sep 21, 2017 01:18
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i consider the sky worthwhile and would not be opposed to having a second one somewhere |
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Sep 21, 2017 01:42
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treasure bear posted:i consider the sky worthwhile and would not be opposed to having a second one somewhere Perhaps in a bureau, next to one's undergarments?
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Sep 21, 2017 03:04
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since the advent of electricity, earth is all lit up and poo poo. I like to think that we are really confusing some people looking in our direction because we kind of blend in the starfield because we have so many lights, but they keep going on and off at random times and so these aliens have a really hosed up understanding of how stars work because of it. idk if scientifically that would make any sense, but it'd be a pretty good laugh when we all meet up down the road. "we thought your planet was a like a belt of very tiny stars" "lol, we thought you'd be green or gray and have big ole eyes!" *everybody laughs*
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Sep 21, 2017 05:04
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Happy halloween |
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I spend time working in a box so miniscule its irrelevant on a cosmic scale so i can stay in another tiny box and instead I could just go to any of those places and see new things forever |
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Sep 21, 2017 05:41
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i think i should close my mouth first in case a bird is flying over |
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Sep 21, 2017 06:04
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your mom lol let's break it down: - big and empty - seduces pilots - balls of hot nighttime gas - people made a hobby of diving into it - full of birds and bugs |
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Sep 23, 2017 06:09
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I've oddly recently noticed while looking at the night sky how fast the clouds seem to move, I've never noticed this before. |
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Sep 23, 2017 08:59
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Many of these stars are long dead
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Sep 23, 2017 12:07
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Talonz posted:I've oddly recently noticed while looking at the night sky how fast the clouds seem to move, I've never noticed this before. This can be great, especially when they are moving past the moon. I honestly enjoy stargazing, looking at the sky, especially while drinking a beer or some spirits, having a smoke, and just thinking about what is out there, and having a chill moment. Every once in a while it is a treat when you see that faster then most everything else glow that isn't a plane moving past overhead and go "oh dang, thats the International Space Station! We, as earth, have a space station!" I like to dream
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Sep 23, 2017 13:14
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Jedrick posted:your mom lol |
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Sep 23, 2017 14:54
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Jedrick posted:your mom lol 
https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4 |
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Sep 23, 2017 15:14
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for real tho, I often stargaze while listening to recordings of shortwave numbers stations, as to further quicken my decent into madness |
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Sep 23, 2017 17:11
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Jedrick posted:for real tho, I often stargaze while listening to recordings of shortwave numbers stations, as to further quicken my decent into madness 
https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4 |
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Sep 23, 2017 17:17
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Jedrick posted:for real tho, I often stargaze while listening to recordings of shortwave numbers stations, as to further quicken my decent into madness I stargaze listening to shoegaze. I never know where to look and I'm always sad. |
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Sep 23, 2017 18:19
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It was my understanding that all the cool night sky photos online are photoshopped to include more stars than are actually visible. I can't imagine a night sky so vibrant and full of light actually existing. I've lived in urban or suburban areas my whole life, and now that I'm thinking about it, I've never been to a rural area without any light pollution for an extended period. The closest I've come to a transcendental cosmic experience was when I visited Lake Jackson, TX and spent some time at the beach at night. There happened to be a full moon, and it was perfectly centered orthogonally to the beach above the watery horizon, and the sky was completely dark save for this impossibly full white ball, and there wasn't a sound save for the calm rhythm of waves lazily lapping at the sand. I took a video to capture the experience but I think I lost it when my phone bricked itself. Such memories can't be bottled up anyway I think. |
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Sep 27, 2017 12:38
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SciFiDownBeat posted:It was my understanding that all the cool night sky photos online are photoshopped to include more stars than are actually visible. I can't imagine a night sky so vibrant and full of light actually existing. I've lived in urban or suburban areas my whole life, and now that I'm thinking about it, I've never been to a rural area without any light pollution for an extended period. As far as I know, most cool hard to believe night sky photos aren't photoshopped, they just use long exposures. The longer the shutter on the camera stays open, the more light that gets absorbed, making the stars you would see brighter, and also allowing you to see ones that you normally couldn't. Then again, my experience with this is much more "National Geographic" and much less "online photos".
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Sep 28, 2017 11:17
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I always make sure betelgeuse is still there because any day now it's going to pop and it'll be one of the coolest things humans without telescopes have ever seen in the sky |
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Sep 28, 2017 18:47
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Twenty Four posted:As far as I know, most cool hard to believe night sky photos aren't photoshopped, they just use long exposures. The longer the shutter on the camera stays open, the more light that gets absorbed, making the stars you would see brighter, and also allowing you to see ones that you normally couldn't. Then again, my experience with this is much more "National Geographic" and much less "online photos". This is true and to do it you need a special mount that will keep the camera pointed at the right spot as the Earth rotates |
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Sep 28, 2017 18:49
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