This is an experience that I'd recommend everyone to experience at least once if you haven't. The memory is still burned in my lind, a canvas full of stars and the hazy stream of the galaxy stretching from horizon to horizon.
Here is a nifty tool for finding areas with low light pollution near you, which coincidentally are typically home to observatories.
Fun fact: in SF, the fog can act as a light pollution blanket: from the top of Mt Tam, I’ve looked southeast and seen the Milky Way on a moonless night
SF is not a long trip from some pretty dark skies: https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness
If you haven't ventured out to try to see the milkyway (be sure to check stellarium or similar) you should give it a try sometime.
Most of the populated US is a lot further from truly dark skies than we are in the bay area.
It does make a big difference to go somewhere really dark, but that's a bit more of a haul. Once on a trip through rural Oregon I could see the milkyway through my windshield, pulled over to turn the lights off and view and was amazed that it cast a visible shadow once our eyes were adapted.
Rural Scotland here. There’s always clouds. Well, 99% of the time anyway.
So frustrating when there is northern lights and it’s overcast.
Maybe I'll have to go to Antarctica.
Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a long drive
It will blow your mind.
I’d been out of Australia for a decade, living in the Yukon, having all kinds of remote adventures. On my first night back in Australia in the middle of a city of 50k people I took photos because the Milky Way was staggering. 10x what I had seen in the decade prior. This is a single exposure, very much what it looked like in real life
> Dr. Graur said, "I think that the undulating curve represents the Milky Way and could be a representation of the Great Rift—the dark band of dust that cuts through the Milky Way's bright band of diffused light. Comparing this depiction with a photograph of the Milky Way shows the stark similarity."
The stars around the arch are strange. As far as I know, the discovery that the Milky Way consists of stars was made only much later, after the invention of the telescope.
I don't see why. The Chinese called it a river. The Greeks called it a circle. The Romans called it a road.
The English appear to have called it a girdle: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Milky%20Way
> in Middle English also Milken-Way, Milk-white girdle, and Milky Cercle.
["Milken-Way" is a direct translation of the Latin name, and "Milky Cercle" is a direct translation of the Greek name. Girdle is less easy to explain.]
> The ancients speculated on what it was; some guessed it was a vast assemblage of stars (Democrates, Pythagoras, even Ovid)
I don't think there are any texts attributed to Pythagoras, but we might have a text that says he thought so, or that the Pythagoreans thought so.
> I don't think there are any texts attributed to Pythagoras, but we might have a text that says he thought so, or that the Pythagoreans thought so.
It would be remarkable if the Egyptians thought so as well. Especially as they were much earlier.
Pedantically, all the stars you can see are in the Milky Way, but in the sense you mean, the furthest stars are the ones that form the fuzzy cloud but there are closer ones in the same plane that you can see, so it looks like a long cloud dotted with stars.
So you don't need to know the fuzzy bit is also stars to depict stars in it.
Nothing like lying on that bench on the Peloponnese in Greece in the summer. You could watch it for 2h and not get bored. Shooting stars, satellites... it was colorful and humbling.
On the other hand, astrology pervaded everything the Greeks and Romans believed. So much so, that I'd say that metaphors comparing Jesus to sun-gods such as Apollo were rife in the Apostolic Age. It is not difficult to find some pericopes where Jesus' supernatural qualities can be drawn parallel to Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus, et. al. Nor is is a mere coincidence that "Sun" and "Son" are pronounced the same way.
There are a ton of references to someone "entering the house" especially Jesus, and I feel that this had astrological significance to Hellenic readers, with well-established concepts of what an "astrological house" was.
My mind was blown even further when I approached a hypothesis about the Bethlehem Star and its true nature, and the true nature of those "Wise Men from the East" who were following it. It's like, modern astronomers are all gratuitously missing the point by trying to track the thing down using modern criteria. Poor guys.
wglb•2d ago