Someone else's Milky Way
Full Moon was yesterday. The sky has been hazy for six days, the street lamp is as bright as ever, and the best thing I have seen from the back step this week is the Moon itself, which is lovely and also the reason I can see nothing else.
So instead, a sky I have not got. This time-lapse was filmed in Japan and shared on Wikimedia Commons by S3 Channel. I have nothing to do with it except that I have watched it a dozen times.
A few things worth watching for, because a time-lapse shows the sky differently from how an eye sees it:
- The dark lanes. The Milky Way is not a smooth band. Dust clouds between us and the bright star fields break it up into patches and lanes. From a dark field you can see some of that with the naked eye. From my garden I could not tell you it existed.
- The colour. A camera exposing for many seconds sees warm and cool tones the eye does not. To me, even from a good site, the Milky Way is grey. That is not a fault in either the camera or the eye; they are just different instruments.
- The rotation. Hours of sky turning in a few minutes makes it obvious that everything wheels around the pole together. It is the one thing I understand better from a video than from a night outside, because a night outside does not run at speed.
The next New Moon is on the 12th of August, which also happens to be when the Perseids peak. I am already looking at the forecast more often than is healthy.