> Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and even in my nearest "large" city, you can still see the Milky Way on a clear night. Not in all its glory, mind, but you can see it, and Crux Australis, such a definitive Southern Hemisphere constellation that it appears on five national flags. Although it can be hard to see Epsilon Crucis in a city, as it's a bit dimmer than the four main stars.
But then I travelled to far more densely populated Northern Hemisphere countries, and wow, I see what light pollution is, I really wanted to see Orion right side up, but wasn't able to get far enough away from populated areas when the sky was clear.
Another benefit of living on a sparsely populated island I guess, not sure if it offsets all of the downsides (island "tax" is real, small economy makes it hard to challenge incumbents who dominate a market, we get very few concerts from the top bands, often left off maps), but it did make appreciate what we have in terms of the night sky.
I'm a real big fan of dark sky reserves, it's a fantastic idea. [0]
I'm from England, where we don't see many of the stars and when we were university students (over a decade ago now), my wife and I were in Switzerland, up a "hill" near Caux Palace; it was the first and only time I've seen the milky way and the only time I'd ever seen the night sky that way; without light pollution.
I hope to do it again, somewhere, some day because it's an incredible experiencev to just lie on the grass in complete darkness like I've never known at home and let you eyes adjust to just show full the night sky is.
It depends very much on where you are in England. If you want to find the spots next to you where you can see the Milky Way, here is a project that maps the light polution in England: https://landuse.co.uk/portfolio-items/night-blight/
Thanks. I see the festival is at a time of year I'd be too cold to hang out outdoors, do any of these places have purpose built shelters with clean/clear covers so you can be warm but see the sky?
>Satellites shine by reflecting the sun’s light. For this reason, they’re usually only visible during the beginning of night and as morning approaches, when the sun’s rays can still reach them high above Earth. But at latitudes such as 50 degrees north and south, locals will see satellites all night long near the summer solstice, and near sunrise and sunset on the equinoxes.
The sky will be clean during winter, once you get an hour away from sunset.
>I'm surprised at how much stuff there are above me
I mean, it is the... entire visible universe. More than 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Maybe 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe. If you could see into infrared, you could see stuff 34 billion light years away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEERS-93316
When I enter my correct location into the web interface, it thinks the sun has just set. It's actually the middle of the day here.
I've tried slight variations of my current location in case it was just getting mixed up with other similarly named places elsewhere in the world. No luck.
OTOH I already have the Android version on my phone and that has always worked just fine.
This seems like a reasonable choice though (same happens to me), they show you tonight's sky ... otherwise during the day they'd always show a star map with no stars.
What would you want them to show during the day, on a star mapping website?
At risk of sounding inane, the stars are still in the sky in the daytime. A star map showing what you would see during a solar eclipse is not an unreasonable choice either.
It's not stupid to show the stars over head right now, but the utility of showing stars as they appear next time you'll be able to see them seems clearly greater.
You can switch to current time (clock icon, then clock with arrow icon) and turn off the atmosphere (cloud icon) to see what's above you during daytime.
The android app does the same for me, it shows a message with something like "it's daytime in X, fast forward time" and moves to the evening.
In the game Elite Dangerous, the galaxy contains 400 billion stars modeled by a Stellar Forge program. Since it’s launch about 7 years ago, less than 0.5% has been discovered, despite thousands of ships “in the black”.
They had the same problem with Elite Frontier, back in the days :)
That was impressive for a game that fit on a single floppy disk. Well, there was a second floppy disk, but it only contained the midi version of the music, never quite understood what for.
In case someone was wondering.