

Starry, Starry, Starry Night - sytelus
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/03/magazine/look-stars.html

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16s
"WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were
ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to
add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he
lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I
became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect
silence at the stars." - Walt Whitman

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CapitalistCartr
I never related to that poem until I read the Zen Pencils version:
[http://zenpencils.com/comic/88-walt-whitman-when-i-heard-
the...](http://zenpencils.com/comic/88-walt-whitman-when-i-heard-the-learnd-
astronomer/)

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andrewcooke
this is a bit misleading. i've worked at major observatories - the best places
to see stars in the world - and the sky doesn't look like that to the naked
eye. the star images are over-exposed compared to what you would actually
experience. yes, cities have light (and other) pollution, but this is over-
stating the case.

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moubarak
I think those photographs reveal how frail human creation really is.

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RyanMcGreal
Don't forget that these photographs _are_ a human creation.

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ra
It's about time we started to recognise light pollution as just that,
pollution.

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demetrius
Is the gallery specially designed in such a way to avoid allowing "Save as"
link?

Well, I've managed to get direct links by looking at data-original property in
Firebug, so it doesn't look hiding it was a real reason... But why then? Why
such a non-accessible script?

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kosei
Absolutely gorgeous. Though it's still a major city, this is one of the
reasons I'm grateful to have moved to the suburbs of Seattle from downtown New
York City.

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yareally
From what my friends that live in the Seattle area say, you can rarely see
such stars. I'm always like "Hey the moon looks really great tonight" or "I
can see the ISS really well" or "Venus/Jupiter are huge tonight." The usual
response from them is "It's too cloudy here :("

I'm sure things are more visible there overall than say NYC though.

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CapitalistCartr
I was an avid reader of astronomy books as a child growing up in a major city.
I thought the pictures in those books were always taken with a telescope or
otherwise enhanced. Then we went to visit my grandmother, who lived back in a
"holler" in the Blue Ridge mountains. I walked outside after dark one evening,
looked up, and was shocked to see the Milky Way with my naked eyes. I hadn't
realized that was possible until then.

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vishaldpatel
Idea for business.. or umm.. money:

\- A campaign by low pollution lighting using a similar set of images, except
this time, with low emissions lights on. There'd be a before and after to show
the difference between bright lights and less bright lights.

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bfwi
There probably exists some real photographs from power outages, that shows the
night sky over a big city without much light pollution.

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Sharlin
Unfortunately, the regular particulate pollution and heat haze over megacities
are going to wreak havoc with your seeing pretty badly even in the absence of
light pollution.

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dustinlakin
I would love some high resolution images of these.

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aaron695
Fake. And ridiculously so.

You can only see around 2000 stars in total with no light pollution across the
entire sky

Perhaps the photographer is not saying they are realistic, it might be nytimes
being misleading.

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jmspring
Get out into the wilderness sometime where there is no light pollution and
take the time to look up. While 2000 may be the make without optical
assistance, there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast
things are.

Simply stating "Fake", at least for me, downplays the point the
photographer/artist is trying to make.

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aaron695
YES "there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are."

So why fake it. Why show pretend scenes with orders of magnitude more stars
then there should be.

Why not just show real life and how the stars would look if Paris etc had the
lights turned off.

Why show a universe where somehow stars at hundreds of times more than they
are. Isn't ours good enough?

Anyone scientific/technical knows how stupid those pictures look, and anyone
artistic has been away from city lights and knows what stars really look like.

Why break from a great idea and create something so fake looking. Why not make
them realistic and make a point on light pollution and the beauty we are
missing out on. Why can't we appreciate the real universe and how great it is.

Have we become that sad we need to make everything look like a scifi movie? At
least have a couple of moons if you're going to go down that road.

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rplnt
Some of those can be seen with naked eye. Others are taken with longer
exposure times (and using tracers (or multiple shots) to avoid this
<http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg> ). While we can call them
fake, they are not fake in a sense that they don't capture the real thing.

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aaron695
There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of
the night sky?

It implies if the lights go out you'd see around 100,000 stars.

In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights.

How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? Even in the jpg you link
you can see there's obviously one to two thousand stars tops in it.

These pictures are from telescopes, the latter ones even have fake colors
applied.

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rplnt
> There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part
> of the night sky?

The first (or fourth) photo seems to me like naked eye would see.

> In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights.

You can see much more than that. Just the fact that you can see Milky Way can
give it away (although you can't see individual stars, they are still stars)

> How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars?

The less bright ones, that you can't see with naked eye, will appear. Just
take any regular camera, go out and take a 20s photo of the night sky. You'll
see how much more stars you'll see.

Yes, some of the pictures are zoomed in quite a lot, and I don't think they
are colored though.

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aaron695
Interesting I assumed the colours from star pictures are mostly faked /
enhanced / thickened / filtered.

I'll have to look into it more.

