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Comment by f_allwein | Hacker News Reader

The advantage of light pollution is that you can get blown away if you do manage to find a dark spot in the countryside and see the night sky...

Here's an interesting art project that simulates what night skies would look like in cities without any artificial light: http://www.space.com/20615-darkened-cities-night-sky-imagine...

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Totally fake. And obviously so. Wiki how many stars you can see them estimate how many are in the photo.

They're probably time-lapse photos. The captions don't say that a human observer would be able to see this much.

And openly so, as the artist combined pictures of cities with pictures of the night sky taken e.g. in the desert, but at the same latitude. So they are "fake" but plausible.

They're not plausible for a human, even out in the desert far from civilization. Light captured by a sensitive camera and long exposure do not represent what a human would see. Nearly all night time starscapes are enhanced past what a human would see in any situation.

Yeah, those photos seem to be a bit colorized with brighter than reality stars, but I'm willing to be overall density of visible stars would be the same.

A someone who spent considerable amount of time in his youth at dark sites observing with the naked eye, those pictures are not off by that much. To be fair, these are obviously pictures taken in very dry areas where there is no haze. But I have seen similar scenes with the naked eye in the winter before. I'm lucky enough to live in the countryside near the ocean and even though there is a fair amount of light pollution, in the winter I can go down to the beach and see the milky way in all its glory by looking out to sea. People really don't understand what they are missing. :-(

It's not that far off. You can see the Milky Way from the Adirondacks, about 200 miles from the first picture.

These have been made with 30 seconds exposures. But in dark places like Death Valley the sky looks pretty similar. You can easily see the band of the Milky Way with the naked eye.

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