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Texas
Related: About this forumDevils River State Natural Area Named Texas' First Dark Sky Sanctuary
Vincent Lock/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The Milky Way, as seen from Big Bend.
Not all darkness is created equal. In a place like Big Bend, the night sky reaches depths not present closer to a big city. Thats also true of Devils River State Natural Area, located about 60 miles north of Del Rio. Its the newest dark sky sanctuary so designated by the International Dark-Sky Association.
Adam Dalton, program manager for the International Dark-Sky Association, or IDA, says that though you can tell the darkness of one part of the sky, relative to another, with the naked eye, IDA uses a combined quantitative and qualitative methodology.
We use a device called the sky quality meter, which essentially measures the sky to see how dark it is. . . in a scale called magnitudes per arcsecond. The scale goes from roughly 16 to 22 and each move of 1 on the scale is actually a logarithmic change, Dalton says.
This means the sky is 10 times darker at 21 than 20, and its 100 times darker at 22.
Read more: http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/devils-river-state-natural-area-named-texas-third-dark-sky-sanctuary/
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Devils River State Natural Area Named Texas' First Dark Sky Sanctuary (Original Post)
TexasTowelie
Feb 2019
OP
eppur_se_muova
(36,256 posts)1. Woo hoo for astronomy ! nt
Paladin
(28,246 posts)2. I saw skies like that in the Hill Country, when I was a child.
Many years ago.
metalbot
(1,058 posts)3. You can still see phenomenal skies in Hill Country
The Austin Astronomy Club has once a month star parties in a state park off of Lake Buchanan, about an hour from Austin. I was astonished at how little light pollution they have out there.
Paladin
(28,246 posts)4. Thanks for the information. (nt)