please empty your brain below

One thing you can see very clearly, even from Piccadilly Circus, is the International Space Station. It's really obvious, like a super-bright plane. You have to know when and where to look though as it zips from horizon to horizon in about 40 seconds. With binoculars, you can even see the solar panels. It'll be extra bright at the end of the week when shuttle Discovery is due to dock for the final time in it's illustrious career.

Great post, DG... and even better graphics ;-)

Just because the smog of today is not as severe as the smog of yesteryear, doesn't mean it still isn't smog.



Anyone interested in learning more about the mindless stupidity of light pollution will find useful info at the International Dark-Sky Association's website, darksky.org.

When I look back on the smogs in London in the 1950s I think of the trolley bus wires, and where they went round a bend there would be lamps hanging by the conducting wires so the driver could see where to head the bus and not stray off course and have the poles come off. Trains had "fog signals" which I recall were little explosives on the track which were places by a linesman who normally had a little hut by the track to sit in. You could he the bangs quite a distance away. The train driver could not see the signals in the smog, but would hear the bangs which must have had some meaning to him.
A lot of people would be heard coughing in the foul air, a the air has a smell.
On a cold clear night without smog you could see more stars over London in the 1950s, the street lighting was dimmer being either incandescent lamps, some mercury bulbs and some fluorescent tubes. It would still be possible to see some gas street lighting about. The change came when sodium lamps started to be widely. installed, low pressure at first and then the high pressure sodium in use today.
Although we do not see many stars in the night sky over London, I would not want to go back to dark streets again.

Excellent.

Love it!
How on earth do you keep this standard up day after day? I get virtual tours of places I'd never have thought of going, along with some I've been to / plan to go to; thought-provoking posts, smiles, laugh out loud pieces, new ways of looking at things, I've been introduced to subjects I'd never have thought I'd find interesting (or 'never have thought I'd find written about in a way that makes them interesting), something of interest every single morning. Thanks.

What Patrick Moore calls the Aurora Bognor Regis.

What Pippa (so eloquently) said! Thanks indeed!

Thanks again for something great to read first thing in the morning. I've checked this site daily since I found it by accident, November 3 last year.
I'm thinking exactly what Pippa wrote! :D

(Ryanairius!!!)

This is why the University of London astronomy department is based at Holmbury St Mary (near Dorking in Surrey) because the sky in London just isn't dark enough to see anything very much.

Classic DG! Brilliant!

Jupiter is good and bright in the sky at the moment visible even from the middle of a flood-lit carpark (I pointed it out to a friend on Monday).

Further to the smog debate, Claire Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys (meticulously researched as is all her work) states that "There were days when a cloud of smoke half a mile high and 20 miles wide could be seen over the city from the Epsom Downs. Londoners spat black."

London is pretty bad for astronomy, but Jupiter is very obvious for most of the night at the moment as dtl says above, and Venus was very clear around sunset earlier this year (for those who care to look or notice).











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