Starry, Starry, Starry Night | Hacker News Reader

Starry, Starry, Starry Night

nytimes.com

61 pointssytelus26 comments

"WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars." - Walt Whitman

I never related to that poem until I read the Zen Pencils version: http://zenpencils.com/comic/88-walt-whitman-when-i-heard-the...

this is a bit misleading. i've worked at major observatories - the best places to see stars in the world - and the sky doesn't look like that to the naked eye. the star images are over-exposed compared to what you would actually experience. yes, cities have light (and other) pollution, but this is over-stating the case.

I think those photographs reveal how frail human creation really is.

Don't forget that these photographs are a human creation.

It's about time we started to recognise light pollution as just that, pollution.

Is the gallery specially designed in such a way to avoid allowing "Save as" link?

Well, I've managed to get direct links by looking at data-original property in Firebug, so it doesn't look hiding it was a real reason... But why then? Why such a non-accessible script?

Absolutely gorgeous. Though it's still a major city, this is one of the reasons I'm grateful to have moved to the suburbs of Seattle from downtown New York City.

From what my friends that live in the Seattle area say, you can rarely see such stars. I'm always like "Hey the moon looks really great tonight" or "I can see the ISS really well" or "Venus/Jupiter are huge tonight." The usual response from them is "It's too cloudy here :("

I'm sure things are more visible there overall than say NYC though.

I was an avid reader of astronomy books as a child growing up in a major city. I thought the pictures in those books were always taken with a telescope or otherwise enhanced. Then we went to visit my grandmother, who lived back in a "holler" in the Blue Ridge mountains. I walked outside after dark one evening, looked up, and was shocked to see the Milky Way with my naked eyes. I hadn't realized that was possible until then.

Idea for business.. or umm.. money:

- A campaign by low pollution lighting using a similar set of images, except this time, with low emissions lights on. There'd be a before and after to show the difference between bright lights and less bright lights.

There probably exists some real photographs from power outages, that shows the night sky over a big city without much light pollution.

Unfortunately, the regular particulate pollution and heat haze over megacities are going to wreak havoc with your seeing pretty badly even in the absence of light pollution.

I would love some high resolution images of these.

Fake. And ridiculously so.

You can only see around 2000 stars in total with no light pollution across the entire sky

Perhaps the photographer is not saying they are realistic, it might be nytimes being misleading.

Get out into the wilderness sometime where there is no light pollution and take the time to look up. While 2000 may be the make without optical assistance, there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are.

Simply stating "Fake", at least for me, downplays the point the photographer/artist is trying to make.

YES "there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are."

So why fake it. Why show pretend scenes with orders of magnitude more stars then there should be.

Why not just show real life and how the stars would look if Paris etc had the lights turned off.

Why show a universe where somehow stars at hundreds of times more than they are. Isn't ours good enough?

Anyone scientific/technical knows how stupid those pictures look, and anyone artistic has been away from city lights and knows what stars really look like.

Why break from a great idea and create something so fake looking. Why not make them realistic and make a point on light pollution and the beauty we are missing out on. Why can't we appreciate the real universe and how great it is.

Have we become that sad we need to make everything look like a scifi movie? At least have a couple of moons if you're going to go down that road.

Some of those can be seen with naked eye. Others are taken with longer exposure times (and using tracers (or multiple shots) to avoid this http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg ). While we can call them fake, they are not fake in a sense that they don't capture the real thing.

There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky?

It implies if the lights go out you'd see around 100,000 stars.

In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights.

How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? Even in the jpg you link you can see there's obviously one to two thousand stars tops in it.

These pictures are from telescopes, the latter ones even have fake colors applied.

Dude, they're not from telescopes and they're not 'fake' colours. Night sky images are produced by 'stacking' a large number of 1-2 second exposures on top of each other with software.

This has the effect of intensifying light (making dim stars brighter) and increasing the intensity of the milky way (yes, those colours are true) without creating star trails (10 seconds is too long).

To see this with the naked eye you need to spend at least 20 minutes outside in complete darkness to let your eyes adjust.

You need no moon, no torch, no street lights, no light pollution. Only then can you see the nebulosity of the Milky Way (colors), and you will see literally 10-100,000 stars (not including other galaxies, the LMC or SMC).

For some great examples of night sky photography see: http://500px.com/AaronGroen

> There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky?

The first (or fourth) photo seems to me like naked eye would see.

> In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights.

You can see much more than that. Just the fact that you can see Milky Way can give it away (although you can't see individual stars, they are still stars)

> How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars?

The less bright ones, that you can't see with naked eye, will appear. Just take any regular camera, go out and take a 20s photo of the night sky. You'll see how much more stars you'll see.

Yes, some of the pictures are zoomed in quite a lot, and I don't think they are colored though.

Interesting I assumed the colours from star pictures are mostly faked / enhanced / thickened / filtered.

I'll have to look into it more.

Actually, I agree with him. I've been in areas with no light pollution, and you can't see anything like that many stars.

> Fake.

Yes. If you scroll down you'll see the explanation :-)

> Fake.

"a French photographer, thinks he can show us by blending city scenes — shot and altered to eliminate lights and other distractions — and the night skies from less populated locations that fall on the same latitudes."

~2000 with the naked eye. Have you never seen any long exposures of the night sky?

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