Mapping the Northern Sky | Hacker News Reader

Mapping the Northern Sky

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44 pointstmseidman14 comments

Understanding what is in the sky and what's around it is a fun skill to have, you can always tell which direction is what, the time of year (in case you forgot) and the time of night, assuming you are looking outside frequently enough to notice the change. You can even tell how much time has past if you are in the same spot and have a point of reference (like in a hot tub facing a tall tree) using your hand to measure. You can use Stellarium on your computer or phone to help see what's up there as well as a planisphere to know exactly what is up today at your lattitude and where it is at what hour.

Would be a very cool skill to have. And if you travel, you would get to see the differences in night skies in various places.

The fun one to me is realizing how much higher Polaris is in the sky the further north you go. I saw the Big Dipper which guided me to it. Which is actually one of those skills. There are a few constellations that can be used as guides to find other objects along with using your hand to measure angles/distance so you can navigate pretty efficiently.

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/measuring-the-sky-by-h...

Measuring the angle of the north star in the sky was a fun trig refresher

Studying the constellations and learning the sky is a great way to get a visceral sense of our place in the universe. When you can't tell one patch of sky from another, the brain doesn't need a fancy model for the reality of it, and you can go around with a kind of subconscious "flat sky" in your head. But when you start to piece the constellations together, and it all connects up around you, that's transformative. Space stops being something that's "up there", and becomes a thing that surrounds you. It's a strange sensation when it first hits you, and well worth the time to achieve it.

Yes, it's very trippy and disorienting to see something you know is in the sky at a way different altitude, it almost feels like you are on another planet.

Another trippy and disorienting thing is going to a dark sky spot to see a sky filled with stars that you cannot normally see and having to reacquaint yourself to even find the things that are normally easy to find like the Big Dipper.

Yeah, it's wild how hard it can be to find the most familiar things once you go from Bortle 7/8 to even Bortle 4

I moved from the US to New Zealand. I spend a lot of time hiking, and it is very unsettling for the sky to be so unfamiliar. Orion is the only constellation I'm good at picking out here, and it is upside down. No Polaris, obviously.

I spent a week in Queenstown during a new moon, and I almost did not come back home. Being able to image the Magellanic clouds was a bucket list item for this Northerner. NZ is definitely top of my list of relocation places.

I can't believe how many mind blowing targets they have access to compared to us, feels like a different world. I wonder if they are as jealous of our side as we are of theirs...I doubt it! Will have to either travel, move, or use remote facilities to image, but that feels like cheating.

I think it's like anything else in that you take for granted what is readily available yet crave what is not. It is definitely a compelling factor in traveling. The sky is really big, and it would take an entire life time to really view everything in one's own hemisphere let alone the other one. I can't wait for the Rubin telescope to complete its first full sky survey. That'll be a really nice VR experience mapped onto a sphere that allows incredible amount of zooming.

That sounds pretty interesting as a project. I could see it a lot also as a phone app.

I believe this map was built with information from Stellarium, which is also available as an app, funnily enough!

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