How cool is it being in the proper dark!

Not that cool if someone is firing tracer overhead?!

Who said that?

Be cooler if that **** Elon wasn’t filling LEO with space junk.

Yep, love seeing the proper night sky unadulterated by light pollution. The stars are amazing…

Even in an urban environment, it’s still possible to see stars, just not so clearly. I can see all the major asterisms from my front and back gardens, and I’ve got most of Chippenham surrounding me! It’s not great, but here’s the Milky Way from my back garden, you can see the outside lights of the flats behind me lighting up the tree.

You can tell it’s late autumn, going into winter, because you can see Orion and Sirius.

But you see a lot more when it’s really dark and not polluted.  We have a stretch maybe 300m long on my road with no houses, no streetlights and what you see on a crisp night is fantastic

I went caving when I was younger. The leader got us to sit in an underground chamber and turn off all torches.

THAT was proper dark, as in the complete absence of any light. Was a really weird experience.

Similar in one of the old bunkers I occasionally work in. I turned the lights off to see, or not see how dark it was.

Mount Tiede in Tenerife, amazing skies. Those were taken in August this year.

We’ve camped a few times at a Dark Sky Place

Our local council has applied to be one too.

Not sure I have ever been in the “proper dark” (the curse of shifting baselines) but I agree it is amazing going somewhere reasonably dark. Remember on the one night without cloud cover in greater Langdale and being stunned by the amazing sky.

The thing that fascinates me is how the sky turns 3D.

In the city you can only see some of the more obvious constellations, stars are spread far apart and are just dots in the sky. But go somewhere far away from artificial lights on a clear night and it’s breathtaking not simply how many more stars you can see, but how you can see the depth to it.

I went down a mine in Wales.

At the bottom we all switched our headtorches off. I’ve never seen darkness like it (can you ‘see’ darkness?). Pitchblack doesn’t do it justice.

I went down a mine in Wales.

Yeah, one of the first things you do when training with the NCB – went potholing in the peaks & did the same thing.

Back to the OP – one night in NZ driving back to our B&B we stopped in the middle of nowhere & watched the night sky for a good 30 minutes to see the fabulous night sky, awesome:-)

The thing that fascinates me is how the sky turns 3D.

It really does add layers you just cannot see if there’s streetlights around.

One of my lifetime best memories is lying on the heather in the Galloway Hills on a cold night for an hour with mrs_oab and some kids from our outdoor centre just staring at the milky way. I know for one of the teenagers it was a proper life changing evening and trip.

Not very, OFD an hour from the exit and having to wait to get a flash of dim light from empty lead acid cells to grope a bit further before sitting in the dark waiting for one of the lights to recover enough for another dim flash.

I went caving when I was younger. The leader got us to sit in an underground chamber and turn off all torches.

THAT was proper dark, as in the complete absence of any light. Was a really weird experience.

I’ve done this when caving a few times and thought that was what the thread was going to be about.

It is really weird, if you keep your eyes open your visual synapses (not the correct term I’m sure) start firing after a bit, as they assume there’s a malfunction somewhere. So you start to see funny colours like when you press on your eyes with your eyelids closed.

Having been a coal miner its a bit of a bum clencher when the power trips out and all the lights and fans go out. You then hope its coming back on soon and your  caplamp battery will last.

Its a bloody long hard walk outis all I know.

West coast of Lanzarote, no light pollution and the ground is matt black volcanic so there’s just no reflection of anything. Many stars!

Also down a cave, lights off. Proper mess with your head dark.

One night in rural Wexford, walking back from the pub/golf club to my pal’s aunt’s house. We couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We eventually got to the house but because it was pitch black and we were quite inebriated, we couldn’t work out how to open the door with all it’s locks, it was hard enough finding the door and the spare key which was hidden under one of many garden ornaments. My pal had given up and was bedding down on the front lawn (well I think it was the lawn). I wouldn’t give up and eventually got into the house, I was so relieved.

As I’m from the inner suburbs of Brum, I’d never experienced it ever been that dark before, when I was a kid, you were lucky if you could point out the North star.

Woodsters pics are reminiscent of the Milky Way I saw when camping in Pembrokeshire this August. Caught plenty of shooting stars thanks to the Perseid meteor shower.

One of my lifetime best memories is lying on the heather in the Galloway Hills on a cold night for an hour with mrs_oab and some kids from our outdoor centre just staring at the milky way. I know for one of the teenagers it was a proper life changing evening and trip

A good mate teaches outdoor recreation studies which involves taking young adults on all sorts of activities, including multi-day treks. The night-walking blows their minds apparently, especially when he gets them all to turn their headtorches off.

He also has the flipside of this when they freak out about camping in the forest in the dark and he has to take people home because they can’t cope.