Under the Darkest Sky | Hacker News Reader

Under the Darkest Sky

roadsandkingdoms.com

52 pointsQAPereo23 comments

Living in the Netherlands, the light pollution saddens me [1]. There are no dark places anymore. I tried astrophotograpy with a modest telescope from an inner city. With some success [2], but it requires a stunning amount of technology [3]. Still, being able to know that the night is still out there ... even if it's invisible to the eye, is simply amazing.

These days however, I remote control a telescope in Southern Spain. The difference is well, night and day [4]. But sometimes, when the clouds move ... I still setup the scope at home. Just to remind myself that the stars are still there, hiding behind the curtain of industrialization.

[1]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2170422/Revealed-The...

[2]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelkuiper/31870578431/in/albu...

[3]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelkuiper/37078179733/in/albu...

[4]: https://www.astrobin.com/users/joelkuiper/collections/598/

That's quite an investment. I started in amateur astronomy with a C8, film, and manual tracking via the spotting scope. It was good enough for the Orion nebula, moon and planets, but not much else.

I still have that equipment and recently pulled my scope out for the first time in more than a decade for the recent solar eclipse. I really should upgrade to modern equipment some day. But I decided I was happy just looking through my scope and leaving the photography to the pros.

What is it that's mounted above the secondary mirror of your tube? Also, is that a C11?

Yep! Hobbies I guess. It's a C8 EdgeHD, with the secondary replaced by the Hyperstar [1] which transforms the Schmidt-Cassegrain into a Schmidt camera like system (in my case 425mm f/2.1), in that configuration it's easier to trade sky noise for read noise since the sub exposures can be very short. I might one day trade it for the RASA (Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph), but I already have a 12" Newton to maintain in Nerpio!

[1]: https://starizona.com/acb/hyperstar/whatis.aspx

Thanks, I had just found the description of your setup. In case others are curious:

- Imaging telescopes or lenses: Celestron C8 EdgeHD, Starizona Hyperstar 3

- Imaging camera: ZWO ASI 1600MM-Cool

- Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G (HEQ5)

- Guiding telescope or lens: Orion Mini Guide Scope 50 mm

- Guiding camera: Orion Starshoot AutoGuider

- Software: Adobe Lightroom , Pixinsight PixInsinght 1.8

- Filter: Baader Planetarium H-Alpha 2" Highspeed

- Accessory: Starizona Microtouch Autofocuser

If I can get your opinion on something. I have a C8 on a wedge mount with early 1990's era electronics. Do you think it's worth re-mounting that tube to upgrade to modern guiding electronics, or would you just sell the whole thing and start over? Assuming I wanted to capture deep sky objects and moderate light polution.

I'd probably swap the mount for an equatorial mount (Sky-Watcher EQ6 or similar), and use an off-axis guider, with a modern CMOS like the ZWO-ASI or one of the QHYs as imaging camera (much cheaper than the CCDs, and just as good if not better). At prime focus (i.e. without a focal reducer or Hyperstar-like system) getting pinpoint guiding with a secondary guidescope is tricky, but an OAG does wonders...starlight express makes the best in my opinion. Optically the C8 is still fine, you might want to re-collimate it, but that's a bit of an after thought. Calculating the backfocus for your optical train might be tricky. But once you have it set-up on a computerized mount (getting plate solving to work would probably also help, I can recommend Sequence Generator Pro) then you're good to go!

Thanks for the advice!

I live in Chile and have been to places like 200km North of Santiago that are very serious about curbing light pollution. After all, Chile houses more telescopes than any other country and they are a serious industry here. I believe the reasons are that there are a lot of high-altitude places (air is thinner) where the air is also very dry, with a sparse population that doesn't produce much light (especially because of favorable regulation to promote this industry) and there's local knowhow because of all the other existing telescopes.

Not just the altitude, but the dry air. I think the Atacama desert is classfied as of the most (if not the most) dry places on earth. That helps a lot with having almost 100% "uptime" on the scopes, and with atmospheric seeing (the quality of the observations under an atmosphere).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#Aridity says "driest non-polar region".

From the article: “Fifteen years ago, people gave us weird looks,” says Boucher, “but at this point people have heard the basics of light pollution.”

Learned something new today - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

As someone who grew in rural north India in the late 80s and early 90s, there was severe electricity shortage. During summers we used to take our beddings to the roof to sleep in the night breeze with lots of mosquitoes and dark skies. Only way to fall asleep was to count stars in the sky.

For those of you in New York, the closest dark sky site is a few hours west in Pennsylvania at Cherry Springs State Park: http://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark/CherrySpringsSta...

If you are in the bay area head to the western side of the central valley a few hours south of San Jose in the Panoche and Tumey hills, or even better, to the White Mountains in East of the Sierra.

261 miles away :(

I use DarkSiteFinder [1], to find dark spots for astronomical viewing. It's really depressing how far I have to go in the Midwest! to get to a "dark" sky. Depressing!

[1]: http://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html

I also like lightpollutionmap.info [1], which seems to be more up-to-date (DarkSiteFinder [2] is based on 2006 data).

[1] https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

[2] http://darksitefinder.com/map/

Based on a few trips to the Pawnee Grasslands this summer, I can say that lightpollutionmap represents the state of the night sky better than darksitefinder.

What data is this map based on? Just population density?

This map doesn't appear to reflect e.g. airports with a lot of light pollution.

There is a write-up of this site at cloudy nights. Ill try and find it.

It drives me wild how much sky is missing. Street lights are one thing but stores like Marshall’s and other places that aren’t open at night keeping signage on all night and their interior lights just boils my blood.

I wish more local municipalities would enforce restrictions against unnecessarily keeping lights on.

The closest (to me) and only city I know of that does proactively enforce light restrictions is Cave Creek[1]

[1] Pages 14-21: http://www.cavecreek.org/DocumentCenter/View/995

Some good related light pollution links:

- http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/darkskies

- http://www.darksky.org/

- http://www.darksky.org/5-appalling-facts-about-light-polluti...

I lived in a city for about a decade, and recently moved out to a far suburb of that city. I was shocked at how far light pollution has come in just that time... you can hardly see the stars at all. It's not hard to imagine, should humanity be lucky enough to continue thriving, that in a few generations things like visible stars, green spaces, wild animals... will be something left for stories. I wonder if those generations which grow up without them will even know enough to miss them?

I grew up in a rural area, where a few minutes drive out of down would kill most of the light pollution (read: most, not nearly all). I live in the city now and have for roughly a decade, and I still constantly miss the stars.

Even in town back there I could at least get a decent show at night. Here I'm lucky to see a few small specks.

In my experience here so far, people already don't miss the stars. Many haven't really seen them. Even if they visit someplace where they could, they're so unaccustomed to the appreciation that it's not really a consideration.

I live in London during the week; obviously there's massive light & noise pollution, as well as pollution pollution. But at the weekends I'm in Worcestershire, in a village that is not on the gas main, and has no street lights. The difference is like night and day!

When ancient civilizations looked up they saw gods.

What will happen to the minds and psyche of future generalizations when they look up and see nothing?

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