BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Brad Klein reviews upcoming astronomical highlights with Bethlehem’s "Backyard Astronomy Guy," Marty McGuire.
This week, Marty and Brad talk about the No. 1 challenge to stargazing — finding truly dark skies. To escape urban light pollution you will need to leave the Lehigh Valley.
“About a 2-hour drive north of State College, Pennsylvania, is a state park called Cherry Springs (in Coudersport, Pa.), and it boasts some of the darkest skies in… the whole northeastern United States,” McGuire said.
A sign that you’ve found truly dark skies is when you can see the faint and cloudy Milky Way overhead in the night sky. That’s the visible plane of our galaxy, comprising countless individual stars.
For millennia, it was one of the most distinctive features in the night sky, until electric lighting made most population centers too bright to see the faint glow overhead.
