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Well...you can always move to North Korea! Relative to its population size its probably the country with the least amount of light pollution at night.

That picture from space is NOT of an island. North Korea is so dark that it looks like an arm of the ocean and south korea looks like a well light island off of the coast of China.

^^ Oh my.

That is a high price to pay for reduced sky glow.

Yeah. I guess the dictator needs to save on the electric bill. The Soviet Union used to give them free electricity until the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

There are probably other variables with sky glow. The suburbs of Fort Lauderdale Florida are probably no more populated nor built up than the suburbs of Washington DC. But I found that its a lot harder to see stars in the middle of the night in suburban South Florida than in the Maryland suburbs of DC. The sky just glows too much all night long. Maybe its the higher humidity, or the even lower altitude, or something.

It's pretty grim there, isn't it.[/understatement]

To borrow from the word games here at WP - maybe latitude as well as altitude? I spent a lot of time in the mid-Atlantic, some in New England, some in Oregon (plus a few other places)- skies in Oregon were wonderful. I felt like I was falling up into them.

I never got as far south as you did.

In Boston and the Baltimore area I remember a lot of sodium lamps. Nights were very pink.

Colorado night skies are great. Full of stars. And near to DC the night skies are great in West Virginia, and even in rural western Maryland.

There are famous observatories in the tropics (ie near the equator). So latitude per se cant be to much of a problem. But in the tropics were the air is warmer there is more absolute humidity (the air tends to hold more water). That moisture might have something to do with more sky glow.

I'm in rural western Maryland nowadays (by choice). Do a lot of cloud watching, have a ringside seat for weather fronts coming through. I'm not out as much in the evenings, but when I catch the day/night terminator coming through, it's great, and we have enough fireflies in late summer to create their own sky glow.

Re tropical observatories - oh god, I never thought - Arecibo - Harvey - there must have been damage.

Yeah.

E.T. could have picked this moment to phone us FROM home as we speak. Sending us reams of info about themselves via radio. Their equivalent of Britannica. And Arecibo is out of commission, and is missing the whole transmission.

God. That's awful.

But actually. It wouldn't matter.

I used to imagine that there were aliens out at 70 light years away who are now watching Milton Berle pitching Westinghouse appliances to them because 70 light years out that's how far the first commercial television broadcasts on Earth are now. And that's a somewhat embarrassing way to introduce aliens to Earth.

But I recently heard that at about two light years away the radio waves get all out synce so even at the first star (Alpha Centauri four light years away) any TV or radio broadcast turns into static.

The aliens land for the first time. All the world leaders are there. The world's military are all on standby. The saucer's ramp unfolds. The aliens step out. And then nip into Walmart to nab themselves a cheap fridge and fly off again!
I'll be getting strange dreams about going shopping tonight!

Anyhow, we haven't had any pictures for a while, so here is a link to my latest favourite, <clicky> Sean Doran's flickr gallery of images of Jupiter (sorry haven't sussed inserting images yet. ). I think these were probably part of the NASA's project which released a bunch of Jupiter images for artists to tinker with.

I love these for two reasons.
- One of the things that hooked me on astronomy was a volume of National Geographic when I was a kid at the time of the Voyager fly-by. I have the most vivid memory of it having a little "flick book" animation in the corner of the page so that you could see the clouds moving around the planet. I can't tell you how dog eared that issue got by the time I was finished with it! The idea of seeing the "weather" on another planet just blew me away.
- I'm a big fan of the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, and these images remind me so much of his pictures from his free-form improvised abstract period, painted so long before images like these would have been possible.

OMG!

Those stills are awesome.

The vids probably are too.

What Naturalplastic said: OMG and awe.

You see Kandinsky, I see Van Gogh. God, these are just gorgeous. Showing the size of Earth relative to the Great Red Spot without a single word.

It isn't you, Trogluddite. Flickr blocks linking, I think, probably to protect the artists' creative rights. I tried to pull an image - the one with the braided storm - it didn't work. A different image (napping kitten) worked just fine on preview, but it's seriously OT so I'll put it on the kitty pic thread

Please share more these are treasures.

Article: direct and indirect imaging of black holes... unbelievably intoxicating images in this and some delicious vids.

I used it as my desktop background for awhile.

ME 2

An Aurora "Borealis" on Jupiter:



Link to article (from 2016)