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#61 - go someplace with little to no light pollution and stargaze AND #62 - identify ten constellations and ten stars

As much as I love living on the East Coast, sometimes it's frustrating looking at satellite images and seeing the entire Eastern seaboard lit up like a Christmas tree. You can't see anything at nighttime! There are some dark spots in Florida, if you're willing to camp out in the middle of the Everglades...but that takes a level of commitment beyond what my fear of being eaten by a python allows me to have.

Idaho, on the other hand, is GREAT for stargazing, despite otherwise being largely bland and unappealing. (No offense, Idahoans.) Actually, now that I think about it, those are probably the necessary qualities that make a place good for stargazing.

Last night, Ricky drove us up to the top of Mount Harrison around midnight for some sweet spacetime adventures. 

File:Heyburn Idaho Looking South.JPG

It's about 9,200 feet high, which is basically nothing if you're from out west and practically Mount Everest if you're from a place known for being below sea level. It was crazy dark! I had about a foot of visibility once we turned off the headlights. There was a haze around the horizon, but the sky above was incredible. I had never seen the Milky Way in real life before (Ricky was like, "Are you serious!?"), and let me tell you: IT IS AWESOME. Literally awesome. As luck would have it, we caught the one night of the Aurigid meteor shower, and we saw about ten shooting stars during the hour we were out.

I downloaded a stargazing app, which made the whole experience 10x better, because I could point the iPad at a star and it would tell me the name and show the outline of the constellation it was a part of. My favorite constellation to find was Pegasus--it takes up so much of the sky!--and Cassiopeia was another cool one. Thanks, technology.
In the car afterwards--it was too dark to get any pictures outside. (How do you do captions on the Blogger app?? I take back what I said about technology.)

Comments

  1. LizbetSeptember 10, 2013 at 4:46 PM

    That's so cool that they make an app for finding constellations! I feel like we're in the age of Star Trek technology when I hear about things like that.

    ReplyDelete

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