Mauna Kea light levels..

[NickK]

Hehe I've been there.. on a moonless night… but I found it impossible to relay what it actually looks like. Until now.

I found this interesting page: http://www.nature.nps.gov/night/science.cfm

At the bottom is this diagram - comparing Palomar with Mauna Kea:

Now if you think your dark site is dark against a normal observatory site.

Yes.. the brightest thing in the sky is the milky way.. and I can still remember it … looking like that over the night sky.. I really regret not buying a better camera for the trip..

[laser_jock99]

If I owned the Palomar scope I would dismantle and move it somewhere darker. Waste of a good 200" mirror.

[Vanilla]

Yep...it's amazing, here in the states, how people LOVE to light up the entire sky at night. Heaven forbid that some place isn't blasted with photons.

If I owned the Palomar scope I would dismantle and move it somewhere darker. Waste of a good 200" mirror.

[ollypenrice]

You don't really have to go all that far from the Palomar to get to a far darker site. It's pretty dark in the Mohave desert. T'was ever thus. I have a far darker site than the the Observatoire de Haute Provence about thirty miles from me. They still discovered the first exoplanet, though...

Olly