Look up. What do you see?

Phil Plait asks:

When you look at the constellation of Orion from your area, what do you see?

I know I don’t see as much as I’d like to, and our neighbours seem to be adding more and brighter lights in and around their homes all the time.

Orion’s easily findable and visible towards the North at the moment from here in Wellington, so the next clear night I’ll be joining in on the GLOBE programme.

This week, 25 February to 8 March 2008, GLOBE at Night are running a very simple programme we can all easily participate in, to map out how dark the skies are:

Because of the ambient light of urban landscapes, many city dwellers have never seen a sky full of stars.

Five Easy Star-Hunting Steps:

1. Find your latitude and longitude.
2. Find Orion by going outside an hour after sunset about 7-10pm local time).
3. Match your nighttime sky to one of our magnitude charts
4. Report your observation.
5. Compare your observation to thousands around the world.

[Via Bad Astronomy : Help map your light pollution with GLOBE at Night.]

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Tagged as: Astronomy, dark sky, light, pollution

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