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Place to see no stars
Name: William B Skrobutt
Status: Other
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Is there a part in space where you cannot see a star with the human eye?
Replies:
I can think of two situations for not being able to see any stars with the
naked eye. One is: you are too far away from any stars to see any. There
are surely vast regions of the universe, in intergalactic space, where no
stars may be seen. (Every star we see at night is in our own galaxy; I have
read that the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galaxy to ours, may be seen as a
faint, fuzzy patch of light in the night sky [I have never seen it myself],
but no individual stars from that galaxy may be seen. Thus, it seems
reasonable to me that one could be far enough away from all of the "local"
galaxies that none of their stars could be seen.) The second situation:
something in your environment obscures all starlight. This would certainly
be the case if you were on the surface of a planet with permanent thick
clouds, like Venus or Jupiter, or merely with a deep, hazy atmosphere like
Uranus or Neptune. And I suspect that there are dust clouds in our galaxy
that do not allow starlight to penetrate completely into their interiors.
Hawley
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Update: June 2012
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