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Ah, yes, amateur astronomy on Mars. Something we'll not be able to do in my lifetime sadly.
I am expecting light pollution to follow us there also
For an article about looking up with the human eye at the stars, the hit on starlink sats is so weird.
Starlink is probably going to be what makes internet initially possible on marks, may even be part of the mars - earth backhaul network, probably spacex will be helping host space based observation platforms (no dust / no atmo). etc.
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You'd expect better from Sky At Night. (Wikipedia says -143 °C, -225 °F)
The attack on spacex at the start - the one company that’s actually likely to put sky at night readers on Mars - took me out of it before the 900C hilarity.
> Night-time temperatures can drop to -900C wait, what?
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This makes me appreciate our moon. How lucky we are to have a moon that is roughly the same size in the sky as the sun is -- aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes.
> aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes. Uh...don't do that. It'll end up being the last thing you see.
Many references, but e.g., https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/safety "Looking directly at the sun is unsafe except during the brief total phase of a solar eclipse (“totality”)..."
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This makes me appreciate our moon. How lucky we are to have a moon that is roughly the same size in the sky as the sun is -- aligned such that we occasionally get to see a perfect solar eclipse and the sun's corona with our naked eyes.
Also, it's more spherical than the moons of Mars.
Ah, yes, amateur astronomy on Mars. Something we'll not be able to do in my lifetime sadly.
I am expecting light pollution to follow us there also
Maybe at some point when the population gets large enough that you'd have imported problems from Earth like random people stealing the Martian equivalent of a CD player and catalytic converter off your rover in the middle of the night, then security lighting may be a thing.
The main use I can think of for outside lighting in the short term would be people doing construction work at night. That might actually be preferred from a radiation point of view; I know Mars doesn't have much protection from radiation, but I'm not sure how much comes directly from the sun versus random ambient radiation in space.
Another possible source of light pollution would be greenhouses with big windows that are lit with artificial light at night.
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I am expecting light pollution to follow us there also
Isn't light pollution due to bouncing off the atmosphere's content? Ipso facto, no atmo => no light pollution looking up a circled lens?