Most city dwellers don't know how much of the night sky has already been stolen by billionaires, because poorly planned, wasteful city lights have already drowned out the stars for them.

[bruceturner@toad.social]

@MFennVT @sundogplanets That's where I am right now, between Bayfield and Pagosa Springs, on a ranch surrounded by the San Juan National Forest. On clear nights the Milky Way is breathtaking.

[douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org]

@sundogplanets the outback of Australia between Mount Isa, Alice Springs, and Woomera is pretty amazing for dark sky. My experience was before mega constellations though.

The eastern flank of the Sierras and out into some parts of Nevada, Utah, and western Colorado are also good. It's less good than it used to be due to everything in the sky.

Some areas in Big Sur if you get up high above the salt air but not too high to get light spilling over from the Salinas Valley or Fresno are pretty good for California.

[8ofpentacles@posts.ashleymcquaid.com]

@sundogplanets Tekapo for me too!! My husband and I are from New England and we went there on our honeymoon 7 years ago. The clarity of the sky + the new-to-me constellations was absolutely mind blowing (he traveled to the Australian outback once as a kid so I’m not sure how it compared for him haha)

[cy@fedicy.us.to]

What I wouldn't give for the street lights to go out at midnight...

[cygnathreadbare@retro.pizza]

@sundogplanets I'm not sure if it was 1993 or 94. My parents read there was going to be an exceptional perseids shower but it was very cloudy so dad took the car and we kept travelling further and further to find a good spot. A province and half later and we were in the middle of nowhere, at a dirt farm track between wheat fields, with camping chairs having a perfect view of the open sky. At some moments there were almost 15 meteors per minute.

[karstan@pdx.social]

@sundogplanets Same on the first one! (Except it was 13 years ago.) It was exceptional. And to think all of our ancestors experienced that every clear night everywhere. It's really a shame that we've denied this to ourselves.

[crabbypup@cosocial.ca]

@sundogplanets

My parents live near Burks Falls, just south of Sudbury.

While they were building the house, they lived in a cargo trailer on the property, and I went to visit a few years ago.

The milky way was absolutely spectacular.

That was the best view of it I'd ever seen, better than during the 2003 blackout.

[lambic@social.linux.pizza]

@sundogplanets We signed up for an astronomy evening in the Atacama Desert, amazing skies.

[delilahtech@tech.lgbt]

@sundogplanets
Ah, reminds me of a solo road trip I took from California Seattle to visit a friend... This was in 1997-98

I got to see Hale-Bopp and aurora borealis on the road

Plenty of both driving right at 'em through the empty parts of Norcal and Oregon

[drewdaniels@mastodon.online]

@sundogplanets
My backyard in Winnipeg, seeing the moons of Jupiter like a mini solar system for the first time.
I was fortunate to grow up seeing many dark sky’s so often wasn’t as perspective shattering. I enjoyed the Milky Way reflected in a lake, or watching the percieds at a lake edge like Moon Lake, in Riding Mountain National Park.
Staring up from the backseat of a car travelling at night across Saskatchewan is amazing.

[ali@river.geek.nz]

@sundogplanets Sitting on various beaches in the Abel Tasman National Park, back in the first decade of the century before the light pollution from development crept closer - satellites were a rare and kinda exciting thing to see, but the big Aurora in May 24 was the genuinely life altering experience for me

[captpackrat@pawb.fun]

@sundogplanets Camping on the rim of the Grand Canyon when I was in high school. It was so incredibly dark and yet there were so many stars in the sky that it was almost frightening.

The sky was nearly that dark when I first moved to rural Nebraska 20 years ago. I was able to take photos of comets, galaxies, and nebulae using just a regular camera with a tripod, I didn't even have a telescope. Now the suburbs of Omaha and Lincoln have grown so much that it's barely better than when I lived in Southern California.

[momomoto@kind.social]

@sundogplanets It wasn’t the biggest or most auroratastic, but I remember being at a friend’s cottage just outside North Bay, Ontario 20+ years ago, and seeing the Milky Way for the first time. First time I’d been anywhere approximating a dark sky.

[jason@logoff.website]

@sundogplanets @catsalad @ariadne I camp at sites off the side of a highway 20mi from major metropolitan areas and can see them with the naked eye

[jlundell@ioc.exchange]

@sundogplanets walking to the barn every night for the late horse feeding, Skull Valley AZ, watching the parade.

[vapaad@wandering.shop]

@sundogplanets when I was furloughed from work in 2020 and on my ~hmm where should I remake my life tour~ my partner pulled over off highway 50 near absolutely middle of nowhere, Cimmaron Colorado

after letting my eyes adjust, it was my first time not seeing fuzzy I think that's the milky way but actual holy shit that's the milky way, dazzling. I have not wanted to live somewhere I couldn't get that since.

[ambientspace@cloudisland.nz]

@sundogplanets my astigmatism started to affect my vision in the late 80’s. I miss the clarity of star gazing as a young person under 20.

I remember some epic Northern Lights during the winter of 1985 in New Hampshire.

[dpnash@c.im]

@sundogplanets Specific example: I’d been doing amateur astronomy actively as a hobby for about a decade by then, and was quite comfortable finding my way around the sky without a reference, even in ultra dark skies with too many stars to count.

One night at that particular star party, I found myself looking at a bright star that I couldn’t quite identify. It took me a minute or so to realize that I was looking at Polaris.

The sky was *so* dark that the stars of the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor) were almost completely swamped by dozens of other stars nearby that are completely invisible from the city and even not readily visible from “ordinary” dark sites. You’d think the stars of the Little Dipper (though kind of dim by overall star brightness standards) would be bright enough to be clear under such a dark sky. From a kind of, sort of, dark sky, sure, that’s what you experience—but from there, they were literally swamped almost beyond recognition.

The kind of sky where you almost feel you need to hold onto something because you feel like you’ll float off and drown in the stars if you’re not careful.

[somebody@circumstances.run]

@sundogplanets I'm a flyover country dweller who has been madly in love with the plains as long as I've been alive and this is maybe the best poetry I've read that explains exactly what is so awe inspiring about living in a place where the land is as close to flat as it can get. it's the one place where you can tell how big this entire thing really is. a few of the times I've cried the hardest it was looking up at the milky way where there were no lights for miles, and no hills or mountains to take away any section of the firmament. it was just me and the sky, it was just the finite and infinity. There are people who have never seen a sky with more than a few dozen stars. There are people who think that everything that's here is big.

[intrepidhero@mastodon.social]

@sundogplanets I was sleeping under the stars on the Deschutes River, in eastern Oregon, in a horseshoe canyon, summer of '98. I woke up in the middle of the night with the Milky Way overhead and more stars than I had thought possible.