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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.

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.

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Rather, go to Atacama, in Chile. It's a desert with pretty transparent air and little to no clouds, far from anywhere, and easier to traverse than a forest. It's also rather closer to the South pole, so not as hot as Amazon.

Agree with this. It’s the most beautiful night sky I’ve ever seen.

The stars seemed to shine 10x brighter than other places, even those without light pollution.

Apparently the desert in Kashmir (I think Ladakh specifically) is also excellent for astronomy for similar reasons - a dry desert, cool due to its altitude, and also benefits from thinner air causing lesser distortion.

How’s the insect situation?

In the desert? It’s the driest place in the world

There's a lot of big telescopes in north chile too

I've been to many places around the world from the Amazon rainforest to the Atacama Desert in Chile to right around Africa.

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.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CersLuLBfCz/

Australian here, spent my youth in the deep West.

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.

I grew up in rural Australia.

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.

What? Even in a large park in Tokyo, you can see stars. What a silly comment.

Can't see the pictures due to login required :-(

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)?

>Can't see the pictures due to login required :-(

Works for me (without login). I'm not sure why, it could be uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger maybe.

I'm running uBlock Origin, and don't care to disable it, oh well.

Well if you're running uBO and still need to login to see the picture, then uBO isn't helping avoid the login obviously. I'm running Chrome with uBO and Privacy Badger and a few other extensions, so you might want to try PB.

The picture is amazing!

The most amazing sky I’ve ever seen was when I arrived in Urubichá in Guarayos region of Bolivia in 1998 before the electricity arrived in the area. I traveled by bus to visit my friend’s childhood home. The bus only went to the big city an hour away so I road in the back of a jeep the rest of the way, at night. I remember vividly not understanding what this super-bright light was in the sky. I know now it was either Venus or Jupiter, but it looked artificial because it was so much brighter than I was used to seeing.

Venus always appears near the sun (hence the "morning star" moniker).

If it's near the sun you cannot see it in the middle of the night (except in polar areas during summer). But why only morning and not evening?

Mornings and evenings.

It is because its path is closer to the Sun. So when looking towards it you are always partly looking towards the Sun.

So you are saying the morning star name is technically wrong? It should be the morning and evening star? Of course star is wrong, too...

You'd prefer the more accurate and historic Wandering Star?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet

Venus is known as either the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ depending on where Venus is in its orbit relative to Earth.

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.

It is just so fascinated for me

The profound beauty of our universe when seen under the right conditions.

> the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992.

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.

Fair point about the exact terminology but those are tiny two lane roads with impassable grades for the majority of commercial traffic. The term highway has drifted in colloquial use (hence your use of the word “was”).

Yes, they were two lane roads. But no, they did not have impassable grades. Neither Loveland nor Berthoud Pass were easy, especially in winter, but they did in fact carry lots of commercial traffic (though I would think twice about sending an oversized load over them). In fact, to this day the old two-lane road of US 6 over Loveland Pass is used to keep hazardous material out of the I-70 tunnels.

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".

> The term highway has drifted in colloquial use

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.

> My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.

Check out Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_Springs_State_Park

Pine Mountain Observatory, if you're on the West coast, has some of the darkest skies, best weather and stable atmosphere for good seeing. 24 inch telescope, too.

https://pmo.uoregon.edu/

You can see a brighter part of the Milky Way in the Southern hemisphere than you can in the Northern hemisphere.

It rains almost everyday, mostly in the late evening and night. My guess is clouds would be your main concern, not light pollution.

The problem with your takeaway is that you a) won't be able to realistically get deep into the amazon rainforest and b) the tree canopy would cover all of the sky ;)

Also, there's likely to be cloud cover and mist, etc. Rainforest!

Yep. It's way easier to take a boat to the middle of the ocean - fewer roads than even in the amazon :) and the best starry sky of my life

This is a dream of mine, to soend the night far away from land that there's nothing around but water.

Did you already have sea experience, or did you just rent a boat and gave it a try?

>> 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.

Would a simple cruise ship ticket do it? Or be too lit up at night?

Cruise ships dont have dark decks or other places to view the ocean directly at night. It would be like standing on your porch with the exterior lights of ypur house left on.

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.

Also an area that is dark enough for ‘far enough’ that your eyes will naturally adjust to pick up these faint light sources. While some adjustment happens even in a few minutes, the difference between that and after several hours of darkness is mind blowing.

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.

Just drive an hour away from your nearest city, to the "rural" parts of your state. That's all you need to see a gorgeous night sky. You will see a beautiful sky even just a mile or so outside of a small town of 10k people.

     > please do not just head over the horizon simply to see the stars

The horizon is only about 5km away. Not that dangerous.

Someone who has no experience in a boat, who is also on a boat they are unfamiliar with, is probably also not that familiar with navigation.

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?

5km out to sea is far more dangerous than you think. For starters, you're 5km away from help. The water is deeper, and the currents and wind stronger.

Nothing but Cthulhu's dreams under you :')

I think the graphics have numerous sources and mostly/entirely aren't made by the post author. There are five different styles in the first six map images!

They make a map for this: https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness

For the North American peeps, check out the western part of the US.

*edit: and forecasts https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/

The astrophotography communities I am a member of tend to use the Bortle scale map at https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/

This one is more mobile-friendly, IMO.

You should have very dry air for the best place, which I guess with all that Amazon rainforest thing, would not be your best option. Chile has the one of the driest deserts in the world.

Just come to NZ, go to the Dark Sky Reserve centered around Lake Tekapo and enjoy the Milky Way in all its glory.

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.

NZ sounds heavenly.

I love these maps, it’s an awesome collection! I make data vis maps for my day job and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that each of these are completely bespoke, made by different people, using a unique technique - python, hand drawing, ArcGIS, Blender, and even R can be used to make these, and I usually use deck.gl

They’re fun to make combining design, data, graphics programming, and lots of fiddling to get the tools to do what you want!

Not really, that would probably be the north of Chile on the Atacama desert, there's a reason why the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope and Vera C. Rubin are being built there.

Can confirm, was there in 2001. The clarity of the air owing to lack of moisture and no light pollution means you get amazing views of the milky way.

i'm going to assume that commoners like us don't have access to that telescope.

It wouldn't give you the bombastic views you are used to from press realeases.

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)

Pretty sure you can rent telescope time it's just booked so you might have to wait.

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!

There are plenty of remote telescope services you can make use of. The one at http://telescope.live/ is probably one of the best known in the astrophotography communities I am a member of, but there are many others.

Watching this footage of the Very Large Telescope in Chile was the first time I really grasped that we're all together on a rock tumbling through the vastness of space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFpeM3fxJoQ

I've lived on both the eastern and western slopes of Colorado. They are still practically two different states culturally and economically.

Several of the maps were made by Twitter users @researchremora and @cstats1, using R and the rayshader package.

The sky from the top of Mauna Kea is ridiculous, and it's pretty easy to get there: fly to the big island of Hawaii, then sign up for the tour, I think it's less than $100. The milky way is stunning.

Just check the lunar phase before you book. Made the mistake of being in Hawaii during the full moon, so we didn’t get much of a view of the stars on our Mauna Kea trip. Don’t get me wrong - the experience of visiting to the top and watching the telescopes opening up was worth the trip, but we missed out on a real stargazing opportunity.

And we did see a fireball meteor, so that kinda made up for it. But I don’t think those are guaranteed.

My nomination for night sky viewing: Ölgii in western Mongolia (was there for the golden eagle festival). Clear desert sky, accessible by airplane, not a tiny town either.

I thought that Hawaii is the best place to go see the Milky Way

It's a fantastic drive if you've never done it

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