I saw the best Milky Way of my life while driving from Las Vegas to Phoenix on a summer night. My friend’s car had a sunroof, but I had my eyes on the road so I hadn’t noticed. At some point the guy sitting at the back points up and goes “is that the Milky Way??” And my friend who was on the passenger seat goes “you know the sunroof is tinted right?” It was SO BRIGHT! We stopped the car, went out and stayed there a good half hour just staring up, one of the best memories of my first trip to the US.
j-krieger · 7h ago
Stars are actually really really bright. We just forget since we block our view with smog and lights.
typeofhuman · 3h ago
I can only imagine what the night sky looked like before electricity.
Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a long drive
markus_zhang · 2h ago
You can use the black map to find spots. Most likely there is one close to our city, "close" defined as within 2-3 hours of driving.
AngryData · 12h ago
This shouldn't be surprising to anybody who has spent time outside away from light pollution. Living in a rural area it is clearly and obviously visible every night when there isn't clouds.
nelblu · 6h ago
Agreed, this shouldn't be surprising at all, on the contrary it is sad that today's urban generation will never appreciate what it is to look up and only see stars. When I was a kid we used to sleep on the terrace during summer season. My uncle and I would stare at the stars, constellations, meteors etc. and he would tell me their names in both English and in my native language. It was quite fascinating how the mythologies of the constellations were different in different languages. Ex: The great bear (ursa major) was known as the seven sages (when translated in English). The pole star was a mythological diety, Orion the hunter was actually a deer. Sometimes we stayed awake well into the early dawn. Those were some of my best childhood memories.
typeofhuman · 3h ago
One of the things that shocked me the most when visiting New York City is that on a daily places I would only see a tiny, narrow sliver of the sky. It's mostly covered up by buildings. Then I wondered what affect this has on the people who live there. It was awful for me.
pests · 10h ago
There is a story of come city in the US (San Fran?) losing power and emergency services were overloaded with calls of people freaking out over the milky way.
derwiki · 9h ago
The story is Los Angeles, but not sure the veracity
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
nullc · 4h ago
Much of Marin is relatively non-light polluted compared to similarly populated areas thanks to the outdoor advertising prohibition, though LED street lights have made things worse. (I'm not disputing the fog blanket point, but it's presumably helped by reduced light pollution).
ljlolel · 1h ago
I feel lucky that I often see a lot of stars and constellations, even during twilight, in the middle of downtown San Francisco
bdbenton5255 · 12h ago
Not surprising if you've ever had a good look at the Milky Way from the wilderness or countryside. Growing up in well-lit suburbs, I didn't see the Milky Way until I went backpacking in the granite domes of the Sierra Nevadas.
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.
The article is actually about the link between Nut and the Milky Way - and not that anyone is surprised that ancient Egyptians could see the Milky Way.
infradig · 2h ago
The milky way and zodiac from the Bible 2000 years ago... Revelations 22: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
FjordWarden · 5h ago
I thought that the Milky Way was to the ancient Egyptians a representation of the Nile and that the great pyramids are the band of stars in Orion. Maybe that is a cooky theory but not that unlikely that a perplexed person from 4000 years ago things the same as a confused person today.
smolder · 9h ago
This is easily understood in the context of ancient nights with no light pollution, and fewer distractions. Regrettably, I think some people will frame it in a way to try to support theories of ancient lost technology, alien influence, or similar scientifically and epistemologically unsound narratives.
HarHarVeryFunny · 1h ago
Right - they saw something glaringly obvious in the night sky, and depicted it. There's no indication that they understood what they were looking at.
neuronic · 7h ago
Seeing the Milky Way and thousands of stars in all colors and brightnesses, sparking and not, is my favorite non-social memory of all time.
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.
nurettin · 4h ago
Egyptian: Draws stars along a line
Conspiracist: Rubbing hands together
markus_zhang · 2h ago
Ancient aliens!
cubefox · 9h ago
> However, on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress of Amun-Re who lived some 3,000 years ago, Nut's appearance deviates from the norm. Here, a distinctive, undulating black curve crosses her body from the soles of her feet to the tips of her fingers, with stars painted in roughly equal numbers above and below the curve.
> 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.
svachalek · 2h ago
If you think of stars as "points of light in the sky" as depicted here, there's really nothing strange about it.
cubefox · 1h ago
The strange thing is that since you can't see the points in the Milky Way without a telescope, it's unclear why the Egyptians drew stars on the edge of their depiction of the Milky Way. It seems they would have assumed it's a long cloud or something like that. (Indeed, an old name for "galaxies" outside the Milky Way was "nebulae" until a few hundred years ago.)
Maybe I'll have to go to Antarctica.
Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a long drive
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
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.
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
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.
> 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.