March 29, 2019 / Star Scribe / 0 Comments
After my confession about how bad I am at naming constellations, I decided to do some digging into where you can go for the world’s best stargazing. I think part of my problem is that I live in an urban area, and I can’t see much due to light pollution. Plus if you travel far enough, you will get to see some stars and constellations that aren’t visible in your part of the world!
You can afford it using travel coupons!
I know what you are thinking, isn’t travel around the world just to look at some stars kind of pricey? Well it doesn’t have to be! I found some awesome travel deals at couponjournal.org. There’s also a hotels.com discount at DiscountDoggo, and the great thing about stargazing is that you don’t need to stay in a fancy hotel or book an expensive tour. It’s all done outside for free!
The Top 6 Places for Stargazing in the World
Travellers love the extraordinary nature of viewing stars from magnificent places. In fact, travel-savvy people usually fall in love with fantastic stargazing regions. The world all over has beautiful places to view the stars from, in typical public areas about 500 stars can be viewed in the sky. However, there are astronomy-friendly regions where one can view over 10,000 stars! The 6 regions outline below have amazing stargazing places.
Canada
With the Trout Point Lodge in Nova Scotia and Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada is surely among the best places to visit. The Trout Point Lodge is a certified hotel that has positive reviews. The New York Times describes it as “Worth a visit no matter what the season.” The Time Magazine writes, “Attention astronomers, contemplators; the best places for spots for stargazing in the universe.” Indeed, these reviews are not in vain.
Jasper National Park in Alberta gives terrific views of the sky at night. Walking through the park itself is a memorable experience: winding roads making their ways through the spruce forest to the Rockies.
Hawaii
Visiting the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii can cause health issues, I’ve been myself and the elevation at the summit made it difficult for me to breathe if I moved around too much. Mauna Kea is among the few regions in the world where one can drive from sea level to 14,000 feet above sea level within 2 hours. The drastic weather and air pressure changes that occur during the travel are responsible for dizziness and respiratory issues. They recommend that nobody who is pregnant, in poor health, or under the age of 16 go beyond the visitors center. However, the summit also has some of the most breathtaking sunsets you will ever see.
The visitors center halfway up the mountain is much easier to access and guests receive free lectures and telescopes on specific nights when the West Hawaii Astronomy Club is there. There is some truly spectacular stargazing with the aid of telescopes, I was able to make out Saturn and its rings!
New Zealand
The Mackenzie Basin of New Zealand is the home of the enormous Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. When you visit the site, you will not doubt why many astronomers camp in the region. The site offers fantastic night views of the sky, with visibility of Milky Way Galaxies Satellite.
Namibia
The Namib Desert of Namibia boasts of one of the best tourist destination sites in the world. Notably, the NamibRand Nature Reserve is a frequent visit site. The closest village from the reserve is 60 miles. Visitors are usually led through the beautiful dune exploration. However, for star gazing fans, the big attraction is the camping complex. The complex provides not only clear stargazing but also a superb view of the Desert Mountains.
Morocco
The Canary Islands of Morocco has one of the best stargazing experience. In Particular, the biggest Canary island (Tenerife), is one of the most amazing destinations. What is more, the region’s authority canceled flights flying above the Tenerife skies to preserve an undistracted clear view of the night sky. Besides, the place has a variety of festivities that have been attended by space celebrities like Neil Armstrong.
Chile
Deserts are arguably the best sites for clear and fantastic sky views, and the Chilean Atacama Desert is among the best locations. Despite having observatory equipment, the place has sufficient hotel features. The site gives personalized and memorable stargazing experiences.
There are other places with good star viewing like Pic Du Midi of France and Cherry Springs State Park of Pennsylvania. But the above sites in six different countries are excellent places to visit for the most exceptional stargazing experiences.
July 10, 2018 / Star Scribe / 0 Comments
Thinking About the Universe While Taking Crafting Classes
Taking a video-on-demand course on craftsy.com, I couldn’t help thinking about things both big and small. The star-fields in that show are amazing to look at. It does make me wonder how accurate those star fields are. Lots of people, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, can tell you right away when a star field on a TV show is inaccurate.
One night when I was 18 years old I was at a lake with some friends taking a night-time dip. We were there for the phosphorescence: little particles that light up at night from friction.
While the phosphorescence wasn’t nearly as visually striking as the movies made it out to be, a friend of mine looked up to the stars and told me about a little theory. He said:
“If the universe is infinite, then there are infinite variations of our world throughout the galaxy. What this means is: anything you can imagine: it already exists in the universe”.
It was a really cool idea. I already knew from Stephen Hawking’s theories that the Universe, while so vast that we can barely comprehend it, isn’t infinite. That’s an older theory from the days of Einstein.
But it did make me think: even without the infinity factor, are there other worlds where we evolved in exactly the same manner, and in these worlds, are there different versions of us? Perhaps there’s a version of you that asked one girl out on a date instead of another, and ended up married to a different person. Or you took a different job, studied a different degree?
In the incalculable vastness of space, we can’t truly rule anything out yet. Discovering these kinds of secrets of the universe will take vast amounts of time.
Here’s my take on the whole issue, using my very limited brain and limited knowledge:
I think that life, evolutionary processes and more actually have bottleneck moments, where life can evolve in one particular way. When we look for lifeforms that aren’t carbon-based, for example, we run into a problem: our body is an assortment of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (stay with me, here,), and those elements stick together in ways that allow for life to form because of how they chemically bond with each other.
Now, the periodic table only has so many elements in it. Can there be a lead-based lifeform? The elements that combine with lead are limited.
Although, this is my first-year university Biology-educated mind speaking, and I truly am completely open to my mind being changed.
Going back to another galaxy with a version of me that asked another girl out and had a completely different life as a result, well, he could exist. And if I visited this world, I would find the genetic clone of myself, sitting with another girl, perfectly content and not realizing the vast galaxies I had traveled to witness this. He wouldn’t know me. Would you recognize yourself if he or she walked by?
Maybe I would tip my hat to him. Maybe I would tell him he should’ve asked out the other girl. And in the vastness of space maybe, just maybe, there’s room for both destinies to play themselves out.
November 6, 2017 / Star Scribe / 0 Comments
Welcome to the New Universe! Here we wanted to create something truly unique and amazing for lovers of science and the imagination. We have created a cool and interactive website where fans of all kinds of amazing and inspiring things can come together and share them.
A GoDaddy Renewal Coupon Code is What Saved Us.
First off we wanted to thank couponwebhosting.org for giving us a couple of hosting coupon codes we needed to get our website up and running again!
As our first post as we start back up, we wanted to explore one of GoDaddy products. Here’s a great overview of ‘GoDaddy Pro’, a new GoDaddy feature for power users to use reseller hosting. Do you have clients? This is a one-stop shop that lets you set up websites and bill clients all at the same time. If the above site doesn’t have the right promo code for you, check out Couponwebhosting.org. Click here to see deal.
January 1, 2015 / Star Scribe / 0 Comments
This is one of the many constellations that I’d like to easily identify in the sky.
I love outer space. I would read every space-based science fiction book out there. I dreamed of being an astronaut as a child, of one day moving to a city on the Moon, or Mars, or in orbit around the Earth. Everything about outer space amazes me. Except I have one glaring weakness:
I don’t know the constellations.
I look up at the sky and, like most people, am blown away by the vastness of the universe. But if you ask me about the constellations, I can’t tell you anything.
Sure, I can identify the Big Dipper. And Orion’s belt, because it’s three starts in a line. But if you ask me to identify Gemini, Taurus, Aries, or anything else in the sky, I curl up into a ball.
It’s one of those things that have always bothered me. The stars don’t look anything like the images that they are supposed to represent, so I never bothered learning them. But years later I regret that decision. That’s why I’m going to take a course in astronomy.
I like online courses (community colleges at night scare me) so I’ve decided to enroll in an udemy course that teaches you astronomy for beginners. I used a coupon website so it only costs me $10.
Update: Since people have been requesting which site I used, I’m including a link here:
I’m looking forward to brushing up on the things I already know, as well as finally going over the constellations and learning them properly.
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There’s an amazing scene in an episode of Star Trek (the original series) where McCoy wakes up on a strange city (he’d been injected with a drug that made him temporarily deranged) and he looked up at the stars and said: “Well, this is Earth, the stars are right, but the clothing is all wrong” (McCoy had traveled back to the 1930’s). Anyway, my point is that I’d like to have that skill, where I can look up at the stars and know what direction I am going.
That would be pretty handy, right?
By the way, this is the course I’m taking: https://www.udemy.com/astronomy-state-of-the-art/.