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Old August 13th 13, 03:02 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
George Kerby
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Default Nasa picture of Moscow




On 8/12/13 11:06 PM, in article
2013081221065140194-savageduck1@REMOVESPAMmecom, "Savageduck"
wrote:

On 2013-08-12 20:14:27 -0700, RichA said:

On Monday, August 12, 2013 7:10:38 AM UTC-4, PeterN wrote:
On 8/11/2013 9:55 PM, Robert Coe wrote:

On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 17:07:57 -0700 (PDT), RichA
wrote:

: On Sunday, August 11, 2013 4:27:55 PM UTC-4, Sandman wrote:
: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/637319main_iss030e185327_full.jpg

: Amazing.

: Light pollution!

Sure, but Russia has a lot of empty space in which to site observatories.
And
though Moscow looks pretty bright, the surrounding area doesn't look bad.
Compare it to, say, the Northeast Corridor or Hong Kong or Shanghai.

From the air, the Northeast Corridor looks almost like one giant city.


The more advanced the country, the greater the light pollution. Africa
is virtually devoid of it. I do amateur astronomy, so I dislike it,
though if you are doing imaging, it's not as bad as when there was only
film.


Well if you travel to a developed African country with a long history
astronomy such as South Africa you might learn otherwise. The South
African Astronomical Observatory was established in 1820 by the British
Admiralty, much as Greenwich, for navigation and time setting purposes.
Before that individuals such as Sir John Herschel travelled to the Cape
to make Southern Hemisphere observations. The "Royal Observatory" was
built and lent its name to the Cape Town suburb of Observatory.
In the 1970's light pollution around the Cape Town metropolitan area
was so severe they moved the primary observation center to the high
semi-desert area of the Karoo about 150 miles from Cape Town to
establish a field station near the small town of Sutherland.
The night sky at Sutherland:
http://www.saao.ac.za/wp-content/upl...5/milkyway.jpg

There you will find among others, the 74''/1.9M Radcliffe telescope,
moved from Pretoria. Now they have built the South African Large
Telescope (SALT) which is a giant mirror array with an 11 M diameter
making it the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.
http://www.salt.ac.za/


Until 2018, then it will be the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile...

http://www.science.tamu.edu/articles/806/

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope