Stars!

[drplokta]

For our first night after Renovation, we're staying in Alturas in north-east California. Population a bit under 3,000. And there's nothing else for miles and miles around, which means no light sources. And there's no moon, and in fact no visible planets either.

So this evening we drove about seven miles out of town to the edge of a National Forest, parked, and waited for our eyes to adjust. My, there are a lot more stars up there than there are in London. Arcturus is orange! Antares is bright red!

I got a few photos, of which this is the best. If you look closely near the bottom left, you'll see a meteor that went by during the 30 second exposure -- there were in fact quite a lot of meteors, even though the Perseids have been finished for more than a week.

ETA: No, on closer inspection, that one is a plane. But there were a lot of meteors.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd paid closer attention to your travel plans, since we drove through Alturas this evening. We might have been able to meet up for dinner. OTOH, Lisa was on the verge of breaking as it was, so maybe it was just as well that we just grabbed some take-out and headed on to where our hotel reservation is.

The stars certainly are bright in those parts, though. You almost certainly drove through a town where I lived, 30 years ago, for about six months, when my father was stationed at a US Forest Service station at Milford, California. (US-395 goes through the town, but the station is 1.5 miles south and up those mountains at whose base the highway runs.) It was a tiny bit of Old Home Week for me.