Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Stargazing

If you all want to go stargazing, there is an amazing piece of information out there for you. Not only can you check the cycle of the moon to see when the new moon will be or when moonrise and moonset is, but you can find out the ending evening twilight time. (When evening twilight ends that means it’s truly night.) Here is the breakdown:


Civil Twilight—the sun is between exactly lined up on the horizon and six degrees below the horizon. You can still see well enough to do things, but a few of the brightest stars can be seen.


Nautical Twilight—the sun is between six and twelve degrees below the horizon. You can see more stars. It is a really good time to attack your enemies because their eyes aren’t fully adjusted to the change in light yet. Also a good time to be awake and on your guard (called ‘stand-to’) in case they attack you. (If you couldn’t tell, Army is the one who tipped me off to this whole thing).


Astronomical Twilight—the sun is between twelve and eighteen degrees below the horizon. It still isn’t really night yet (that is the next step). But the ending time of astronomical twilight is what you’re looking for.


Thursday is the new moon (which shouldn’t matter too much, because the moon has been setting in the early evening anyway). Go to this website to get your own month-long chart calculated based on your location.

2 comments:

Natalie said...

Sounds romantic...I'm sure that's the main reason you'll use this info, the military use will be second.

Cassandra said...

You should check out stellarium.org. You know, if you're still into stars and stuff. My favorite feature is when you can click on the thing to make the artist images of the constellations appear behind them so you can see how they got their names.