Lifelong city dweller here. I have some perhaps dumb questions. 1) Is all that stuff in the sky truly stars and galaxies and whatnot? 2) Is this a ‘naked eye’ (versus telescope) picture? If this is something people can just look up at the sky and see - and maybe it is in the middle of an uninhabitable dessert - well, I’m questioning my life priorities a little bit lol
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So the main band going across the sky in the pic is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s made up of a bunch of stars, gas, and dust.
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To the naked eye under dark skies you can see some of the large structures in it, but it will just look grey (hence the ‘milky’ name). Our retinas suck at detecting color in low light situations (the color sensing cone cells need a lot of light), so even when looking through large telescopes pretty much every nebula and galaxy just looks gray.
The one exception to this is the Orion Nebula, which is one of the brightest deep sky objects. IMO It’s very slightly green looking (compared to pink in cameras] since of the cone cells in our eyes, green is most sensitive
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You sure can! Unfortunately our civilization has robbed us of things that our ancestors took for granted, including our beautiful night sky.
Also some more details from the source:
OP: This was in Namibia!
USER: Was it almost pitch black when you took the picture?
OP: I shot this from like 12am - 4am. It was completely dark but the whole landscape was lit up by the light from the stars, so to answer your question, no.
Btw, my original comment was a bit confusing because I was replying to the last point only, so I’ll add a small edit: This image was taken with professional equipment and required a lot of exposure to capture as much light as possible - hence why it’s so bright. A night sky seen by a naked eye is a lot darker than this. Still, you’d be able to see the Milky Way and a lot of stars.
![African Night [3840x2160]](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/6a126a42-3f72-4068-aeb0-254e35a019d5.jpeg){kind=link}