Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight...
The stars are reasonably bright tonight.
There's another difference between Winnipeg and Chapel Hill... the stars tend to be a lot dimmer down here.
Tonight I was able to see the big dipper, which is usually too faint to make out down here. I didn't look for the little dipper... I haven't seen it here yet... although occasionally I can make out the north star. I can usually see Orion pretty good, and Cassiopeia. Orion keeps me company on nights that I walk home. Those are about all the constellations I know. I'd like to learn some more some time, but never get around to it. (Well, I can spot the sun, moon, and Venus too, but those aren't constellations.)
I remember back when I was a kid, we went to a drive-in theatre once at Flin Flon. Up north in Flin Flon the sun goes down pretty late in the summer, so I never did much stargazing up there. Well, that, and the mosquitoes came out at night. But I figured the trip back across the lake in the dark after the movie would be a perfect time for skygazing. It was amazing... but I didn't see many stars that night... the sky was filled with northern lights. There's nothing like going across a perfectly still lake under northern lights.
4 comments:
Oh yahhhhh, nothin like a good dark night with northern lights. I started skywatching the Perseid meteor showers in the fall, and 2 out of 3 years been treated to a beautiful show.
Did you see the northern lights in Winnipeg on New Year's Eve, 1993, I think it was... they were *amazing*. We were driving back from dinner at my mom's (then) boyfriend's place. That was a *great* pick-me-up. (My parents had split earlier that year, so I was feeling a bit miserable from all the stuff going on.)
I think that it's not completely fair to use Chapel Thrill as a gauge. Out in the country, where we don't have half as many street lights and such, the sky is actually dark enough to see the stars.
Actually, pfirsch, at the start of the post I was comparing stargazing in Winnipeg to stargazing in Chapel Hill.
Winnipeg has nearly 700,000 people, compared to nearly 50,000 in Chapel Hill. (Both figures were found using google... I don't know how correct the sources are.) Winnipeg lights its streets well enough that there's no problem walking around at night. Chapel Hill, on the other hand, doesn't... the street lights down here are few and far between, and good luck trying to see whether there's anything on the sidewalk to trip over if you don't have a flashlight.
I remember one year there was a comet, and so my family piled in the car to find a dark spot in the countryside to see it better. The view from the countryside was the same as the view from Winnipeg. We now do all our stargazing from the back yard... it's a lot closer. ;)
I don't know if it's the pollution down here, the higher humidity, or the thicker atmosphere (I seem to recall there's more atmosphere at the equator than at the poles)... or if the cumulative effect of the light from the eastern seaboard is greater than the light from Winnipeg... but the stars just aren't as easy to see down here. I imagine they're just as easy to see up in North Dakota, though. ;)
Post a Comment