I took a 2 week holiday a long time ago, to learn sailing small catamarans with the french ‘Les Glenans’ sailing school.  They have sites all over the world.   You can learn there to sail any boat from small dinghies to big yachts.  I took my catamaran classes on the archipelago after which the sailing school was named.  Les Glenans islands is situated about 20km off the Brittany coast in the Atlantic Ocean.  Most of the islands are classified as a natural reserve.  Hence there was no warm water and no electricity.  We slept in tents, had to heat up water to take an improvised shower and sailed as much as we could.

Why this intro?  At night, due to the lack of electricity and being 20km off the coast, I saw the milky way for the first time and a million billion other stars in the night sky.

Back home in Brussels, the Milky Way is for most just a chocolate bar.  Due to the light pollution that our urban cities produce, it is impossible to see the galaxy in which we live.

The Bortle Scale

Light pollution is measured on the Bortle Scale.  A scale from 1 to 9 where 1 corresponds to a perfect dark sky and a 9 to the inner city blanket that covers the sky and hides almost everything.

Check out the image below from RoyceBair.com.  Notice how much of the night sky is obscured when living in a zone 7 area is.  To find out in what zone you live, check out the light pollution map on darksitefinder.com

Light on the end of the tunnel

Light pollution does not make it impossible to admire objects in our solar system or deep sky objects through a telescope.  There are literally ways to filter out the light pollution using: light pollution filters.  Another way to avoid light pollution is to  only capture those specific light frequencies that you want, using narrowband filters.  Those allow you to make beautiful pictures whilst completely ignoring light pollution.  But more on those in a future blog post.