trailer break: ‘Hubble 3D’

I love the opening shot of the star-filled sky. Every night I weep that here in light-polluted NYC, I'll never get that view. Thank goodness for Hubble. And for the Hayden Planetarium.

Oooh, that looks terrific!

Speaking of NASA stuff, have you seen today's xkcd comic about the Mars rover? xkcd is not supposed to make me think about WALL-E and cry!

http://xkcd.com/695/

http://xkcd.com/695/

Waaah!

Yeah, I know. That's quite a strip today.

Every night I weep that here in light-polluted NYC, I'll never get that view.

Don't feel bad. I grew up in a small city and still couldn't see anything but the brightest constellations.

To get views like that, you pretty much have to drive out to the sticks. Styx? Whichever. I'm sure there are places to get good views in NY state. Rent a car and drive out. Bring binoculars and look for fuzzy things that may turn out to be neat globular clusters or galaxies! =D

And yeah, xkcd knocked that one out of the park.

Between that and the trailer reminding me that this was the last Hubble repair mission, I'm all T_T right now.

@CB: I did see a sky like that once, in the hills of rural Idaho, at my in-laws' place. On a clear summer night. Words can't describe how I felt.

I actually asked for, and got, a Celestron beginner's telescope and some stargazing guidebooks for Christmas. I've seen the moon up close already, and once it gets less-than-friggin' cold, I'm gonna drag the scope outside again and see if I can spy me a planet. I feel like an illiterate learning to read the sky, and it feels great to learn. :-)

Are you an old hand at this? If you have any advice on backyard astronomy, or dark-sky sites and stargazing parties in NY state, I'm all ears.

Are you an old hand at this? If you have any advice on backyard astronomy, or dark-sky sites and stargazing parties in NY state, I'm all ears.

Sorry, more like a neophyte! I don't know anything about stargazing in NY state. But worse come to worse, pretty much any state park that lets you camp out should be far enough from cities to let you get a good view of the sky. I live in a much larger city (~1mil now, still no NYC) and only need to drive 'bout half an hour to just outside a state park to do some decent gazing. You can clearly see the Milky Way, which is nice just by itself. :)

I can give you this link, though. It's clear-sky forecast charts for a number of stargazing locations in NY.
http://cleardarksky.com/csk/prov/New_York_charts.html

Bookmarked. Thanks a lot! :-)

This is the thing that might get me into a 3d movie just for the 3d.

Though you don't even need 3d for this to be pretty amazing. See here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uZeeUWrU0

Maybe it's just me, but despite all the rationally knowing all this goes on it still slightly blows my mind to see people actually do this stuff.

More astronomy love: If you haven't seen this video, you should.

"The Known Universe"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

This is based on the Hayden Planetarium's amazing Digital Universe Atlas, which is used for occasional "Virtual Universe Tours" given to the public. I went to one and was blown away. The software is capable of much more than what the video shows; it can turn on the labels for all the named stars, draw circles around all stars with known exoplanets, indicate the current and projected flight paths of the Voyager probes, zoom in on any of the planets in the solar system, and more. If you're in NYC and you dig this kind of stuff, you should try to make time for a tour.

And whether you're in NYC or not--if you have the computer memory to spare, the Atlas is downloadable.

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/

Although there's still nothing quite like looking up and trying to see as much of the real thing as you can, with your own eyes...