While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
The stars actually aren’t changing color (besides variables potentially but they don’t change in seconds), they’re changing cause the atmosphere is distorting as the light reaches your eye - one of the reasons we put observatories on like mountain tops and space is that there isn’t as much atmosphere distorting the light (there’s some newer observatories that can counter-distort their mirror to cancel out atmospheric scintillation).
You can see the milky way if you go somewhere with low light pollution! It’s quite breathtaking. Also every star you see with your eyes is in the milky way. You can also see planets with your eyes, but I think that’s just Venus (which is reflective enough to see) they look like stars but move day to day. You can see some supernovae when they happen, sometimes they’re bright enough you can see then in daytime even. The movement of the stars over the year is highly predictable, even over centuries and milleniallia, some of the real old old structures like Stonehenge are aligned with the movement of the night sky. Because our planet rotates, the stars move, except (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) for Polaris which only kinda wobbles over a year - it wasn’t always Polaris, it had historically been other stars (were talking long long ago history not a lifetime lol), Polaris is in Ursa Minor in the night sky if you wanna find it 😀
If you keep a journal of the night sky you’ll probably notice a lot of the same stuff our ancient ancestors did! We have the disadvantage of light pollution but the advantage of thousands of years of scientific advancement and written and oral knowledge.
Betelgeuse will be going supernova in the next few decades and I’ve been looking at the light fluctuations.
If you are out somewhere dark enough and look up long enough, you usually see several shooting stars.
Also interesting: some cultures recognize images in nebulae and dark spots in the sky instead of or alongside constellations (eg. Australian indigenous Emu in the Sky)
I just read this article about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy
Thanks!
Over the year, the starts shift position. They rise about 4 minutes earlier every day. So some stars you can see now will be invisible for you in a few months.
