Technology

I used to live in Michigan. My family had a farm, nearest city was like 30 miles away, and it wasnt even a large city. I could see the stars and occasional nebula. I remember one winter, my family even saw the Northern Lights. It was magical.

Now I live in Tennessee, in a suburb. I'm lucky if I see a few stars at night. I hate it. I miss the night sky.

Living in a tiny town has its drawbacks and everyone knows everyone’s business, but if you get the urge to just be alone you can head off in any compass direction and find peace out in nature. Sure the takeout options are more varied in the city but constant traffic noise fucking hurts my head and I can’t see any constellations anymore

I like living near people but the dark night sky would be a welcome change.

The lack of fireflies aren't a rural/urban thing, I don't think. I've always lived in suburbs of a mid-size city and definitely remember fireflies swarming around as a kid, too.

The irony is that most of us live in a red/purple blob. A light pollution map pretty accurately matches population heat maps. The only outlier tends to be some resource mines, especially petroleum/gas fields with constant waste fires

I live in Italy. The map doesn't show a single spot below yellow in my entire country.

I've never seen a clear sky in my life.

Come to the UK. We've got official Dark Skies status in Bannau Brecheiniog (formerly the Brecon Beacons). Probably a lot easier for you to get to :)

Sounds like you might have some binoculars. 7x35 or 8x42 or 10x50 binos are great for scanning the night sky. Outer lens diameter divided by zoom = inner lens diameter which you want to be 5mm or greater. 35/7=5 and 42/8=5.2 etc. Some larger "deep sky objects" such as Andromeda galaxy, Lagoon Nebula, Orion Nebula, and Hercules cluster pop right out in my nikon ae 10x50s. Again, they're just smudges, but they're such stationary smudges you'll swear the sky is a painted dome.

As far as unaided viewing goes, it doesn't get any more other-worldly than that!

Dslr? You can (and should) practice more locally. Theres enough stars to figure out what lens/shutter speed combos work in addition to looking up the rule of thumb equation. But none of us ever take that advice anyway

The dark spot in WV might be one of the uninhabited regions featuring a radio telescope facility. Get close enough and they'll start hunting you down for cell phone noise!

When you get away from light pollution you can see a lot more stars and a bright line called milky way. We are part of the milky way and you can see the rest of it.

It looks [https://hr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datoteka:Milky_Way_Night_Sky_Black_Rock_Desert_Nevada.jpg](like this).

In the summer, at night, we're facing the galactic center. You can see the cloud of uncountable stars held close to the supermassive black hole at the center, and you can see the band of light spanning the sky that it the rest of the disk and arms.

It's the reason the galaxy is called the Milky Way, because those billions of stars looks kinds like somebody spilled milk all across the night sky.

If you are in the darkest parts of the world I think you can still see it a bit in winter but you're looking outward into intergalactic space, so it's much fainter, only showing the stars in our arm that are even further out.