Bieszczady - Zero Light Pollution

Hello!

Today I want to tell you about Bieszczady mountains and light pollution. Few days ago I've been there for two nights (target: astrophotography). I've been there second time, but again I've been shocked how dark sky is there.

Bieszczady are small mountains in territory of southern Poland, western Ukraine and eastern Slovakia. It's not very well urbanized place, but it's good, it's very good. We need more places like this, where you can rest, breathe fresh air and calm down.

But what's special there?

Just think a while and tell me, how many stars do you see at night, where you live? How dark is ,,your'' sky at night? Light pollution problem is getting worse and worse by the years and we should do something with this, because it's very unhealthy.

Back to Bieszczady. If you live in the city, or even countryside, you probably see max few (in the city) or several hundred (in the countryside) stars. Do you think it's a lot of stars?

WRONG.
Now, look at view in Bieszczady mountains.

I took this photo during last trip to Bieszczady

Bright milky way and thousands of stars. This what can you see in perfect dark place, without light pollution. Of course you won't se exactly what you see on this photo, because camera have better capability to get this on image. But I will try edit this picture. that you can see similar brightnes to this, what I've seen there.

You can see something like this. But because of human eye specification you see almost everything (except stars) black and white, because human eye can't see colours in very low light conditions.

With event not the best binoculars you can see a few galaxies and nebulas (I've seen M8 and Trifid nebula).

How this situation looks in countryside?

I live in countryside, and the sky here is very bright at night :/
Just look how awfull it looks.

I needed very strong edition to make milky way visible.

Lets look at light pollution map

www.lightpollutionmap.info

Bieszczady are here

I'am here

Lets compare light levels between this two places.
Where I live, Artifical brightness in zenith is 189 ucd/m^2

But in Bieszczady 9.40 ucd/m^2

Now, for example Warsaw 7630 ucd/m^2

And look at this...

Look at this map, find some dark places near you and go there some clear nights, just for looking at the sky.

Here some more photos from Bieszczady.

Photo taken by friend

Now, tell my how dark is your sky, how many stars can you see.