I want to stress that I do NOT live in a good dark skies location. ; The shot I posted was after a drive of 12 hours plus some canoeing.
If anyone is curious about their local light pollution situation there's an interesting tool available. ; First off get Google Earth if you don't have it already.
Then use this link:
www.aoas.org/filemgmt/visit.php?lid=59
Load that file into Google Earth. ; It's an overlay that'll use an image made from satellite observations of light emitted from Earth into space at night. ; They've used that and modeled the effects on night sky brightness here on Earth taking atmospherics into account. ; It's a bit old, it dates from 2001 and I'm sure that my area has become more light polluted since then. ; So consider it a rough guide, perhaps you might assume that your area is a bit worse than depicted, so you might have to go a little farther from major pollution sources to get to good skies.
Remember to save the file (right click on the entry in temporary places and select "save to my places") if you want to keep it, it'll initially only load temporarily.
The picture I took was in an area with the second to least amount of light pollution by the scale this chart uses. ; In comparison I live in an area with the worst, indicated by the color white. ; The scale of this chart has 8 graduations (the least pollution appears to be indicated by clear spots, so it goes black and then clear). ; Um.. here, check this out:
http://www.novac.com/lp/def.php
That'll attempt to roughly define the various pollution levels. ; It uses the same color codes, mostly, except the last color is black instead of the clear that this overlay uses (probably to make it easier to use as an overlay).
In my entire state of Illinois the best I can get is blue, level three out of 8 (I'm using the color scale, not the bortle scale that adds additional divisions in the brighter ranges).
If I drive about 2 hours I can get to a campsite located in a yellow zone, level five out of eight. ; It appears that my astronomy club's better dark sky site is in a yellow zone too.
I remember a camping trip I went on in the mountains in Colorado a while back. The one thing I remember is how incredibly bright the moon was, I woke up in the middle of the night and the light against the side of my tent was so bright that my first thought was that someone was shining a car headlight at my tent. ; I was sort of in a daze and stuck my head out to find out what the heck that light was and was surprised to find that it was simply the moon.
I'm keen to get another shot at that but with my camera gear, there really is no substitute for getting less atmosphere between you and space. ; Also preferably during a new moon, nifty as the moon is it's kind of a pain when you're more interested in dimmer objects.
