For those who swear they have seen a sky with more than 5k stars, next time you're in those same wilderness and staring up at the sky there might be a way to verify whether you are seeing ~4k or ~40k stars.
Here I've compiled a distilled version of the cited tables...
If you happen to be in a place/time-of-year to see Uranus (n.b. cool mobile apps exist to help locate celestial bodies), you can probably see at least 4k-5k stars. If you can see Neptune with the naked eye, perhaps you are actually seeing 30k-40k stars.
If you can see Neptune with the naked eye, you're probably a genetically altered mutant with eyes the size of melons.
Neptune is theoretically a naked eye object, barely, against a perfectly black background. In reality the sky isn't perfectly black, even with no man-made light sources. (See e.g. the Zodiacal Light.) So your chances of seeing +08 objects without binos or a telescope are basically zero.
I lived in a very rural area for a while with limited light sources. On a clear night, the sky was absolutely glorious, and going for night time walks under it was a favourite hobby.
But even on the darkest and clearest nights, with half an hour of dark adaptation, +04/5 was as good as the view ever got without binos.
Agreed. I wouldn't expect anyone would be able to spot Neptune. The comment was basically about proving to yourself that you're not seeing more than ~5k stars.
Those of us with cataract removal surgery can see more stars than most as we've lost the majority of our natural UV filter (it makes seeing the Pleiades a LOT easier.)
It might sound like a crazy question, but are you sure you were seeing the milky way? If you have any streetlights at all on your street, there is no way that you can see it with the naked eye (magnitude +5-+6). If you live in the north, it's more likely that you were seeing the aurora.
Our courtyard faces away from the road; so very little streetlight. And all the building lights go off at ~11pm, so there's no local lights around after that.
It's not bright by any means, but yes it's the milky way. (and I live in Melbourne, Australia; not north in any sense :P)
It would be very rare to see Aurora Australis from here; I don't anyone that has seen that in this area without driving out of the city and using a long exposure.
Can see the milky way much better when we drive 2 hours out of the city to the family farm.
By German standards, that is not very "inner city". Street lights are on all night, and I cannot see any but the brightest stars even on a clear night. Jupiter and Saturn are easily visible, Orion's belt, too, but Orion's, eh, "sword" is very hard to see. No trace of the Milky Way at any rate.
When I was in a rural area at night for the first time, I was floored to actually see a bright band spreading across the night sky. I had always thought one needs a telescope + CCD to get a view of that.
Most of the rest of us in suburban areas have streetlights that never go off, plus an incredible number of them point the wrong direction (some or most of their output goes straight to the sky, which defeats the point of the lamp) or have been replaced with LED versions that are far brighter than anyone actually needs. I can't say that I've ever seen the milky way outside of photographs.
Can attest to this. Australian cities aren’t as huge as US cities. Not Melbourne, but when I made a trip to central Australia to Uluru. We slept under the stars in the middle of the desert. It was absolutely gorgeous and you could see the Milky Way very clearly. Probably the brightest sky littered with stars I have ever seen.
8768 is the number of stars of magnitude still visible by naked eye across the whole stelar globe. You can see a half of it at the moment, and near the horizon you will not see the fainter stars because the light has to pass much thicker layer of the atmosphere. So about 3000.
FWIW, a not-quite-full moon can be visible in full daylight (late afternoon in summer) even in a major metro area (I've seen it in NYC). The key is that you can only see it if it's separated from the sun by a large angle.
Reminds me of the Big Dipper eye test. If you can spot the double star in Ursa Major constellation you’re supposed to have 20/20 vision. The two stars are Mizar (magnitude +2) and Alcor (magnitude +4). In urban environments this is a good combined test ;-)
On a personal note (which I hope many will relate), I’ll never forget the very first time I looked up at the night sky after getting my first pair of glasses. The sheer number of extra stars I could see combined with the clarity, made me fall in love with stargazing :-)
I read somewhere that in Roman times the test to become a soldier was to look at the Pleiades cluster and if you could see seven stars you would pass the eye test.
Of what use is a vision test where it's easy to memorize the answer? In English Pleiades is also known as the Seven Sisters, because of the ancient Greek myth. I can easily believe that Pleiades was also associated with 7 in general Roman culture.
It doesn't help that more than 7 stars can be visible. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades says "Its light is dominated by young, hot blue stars, up to 14 of which can be seen with the naked eye depending on local observing conditions.") Muhammad was written to have been able to see 12.
If someone says there are 9 stars, is that a sign of good vision? Or simply a guess?
In modern times only 6 stars are usually visible to the naked eye, and there are proposals for why 7 was used in Ancient Greece; eg, stellar variability or a numerological leaning towards 7.
NASA used to run an experiment with students counting stars [1] in various sites. The most that was counted was around 5000 which tallys up to the theory.
Reminds me of William Hershel and a classic example of "if your scientific theory relies on you being special/unique, it is almost certainly wrong"
Hershel made a lot of amazing discoveries and advancements with this telescopes, so decided to count the stars in every direction of the sky. He found that there were equal numbers no matter where he pointed his scope, so we must be at the center of the universe!
We are at the center of “our” observable universe. But ... since we don’t still know the bounds of universe, technically we don’t exactly know where our absolute position in the universe really is.
To be fair, Herschel thought we were at the center of our galaxy, rather than the entire universe.
I'd expect Herschel to be acquainted with Olber's Paradox [1]. Olber postulated that if the stars were uniformly distributed in space, the sky would be brightly illuminated in all directions. It isn't therefore, either stars are not uniformly distributed and we cannot be at the center of an infinite universe.
The tone of the article is a bit confusing - I suppose it is written by someone who has a lot of experience looking up and a lot of time spent seeing lots of stars. But as a life-long city dweller with some rural experience, I would have guessed a max of 3,000 or so stars visible when there is no light pollution. They call the number 9,000 "unimpressive" but to me, the idea that my eyes could probably resolve about 9,000 stars at night is incredibly impressive.
Regardless, most of humanity sees more like 10 or 200, which is super sad and I would be interested in knowing if there are studies (or any possible way to know) what kind of effect that might have on a population - not being able to see the night sky well, or at all.
Edit: At night at one spot, there 4,500 visible, not 9,000 - but then we have an odd tagline, again showing the odd choice of words by the author.
> Ten thousand stars bedazzle the eye on a dark night.
Not really? Just 4,500 if you live in the middle of no light pollution.
”I would be interested in knowing if there are studies (or any possible way to know) what kind of effect that might have on a population - not being able to see the night sky well, or at all.”
Perhaps it's the contrast with the idea that the universe is vast.
Looking up at the sky gives us a sense of awe. But why? Is it because we "see countless stars"? Apparently not. 9000 is a pretty small number compared with the grains in a fistful of sand, or a cup of rice. So why does looking at the starts give this sense of vastness?
It's possible that it's an acquired mode of thought. Perhaps to ancient people, the 88 constellations (and approx 700 familiar stars in constellations) were ... just that, a few familiar dots on the celestial vault.
I somehow imagined I could see tens of thousands ... but had never really bothered to count.
Yes, that makes sense. To me, the vastness comes from knowing how many stars are in the dark 'gaps' I can't see with my eyes. And knowing how many of the visible stars themselves have planets. We're getting the to point of exoplanet discovery where you can find a star with your eyes, know which one it is, and check to see how many planets orbit it.
So when I look up at the night sky, I can almost see all the planets orbit all the stars up there, and all the moons around all those planets - and it is vast. Even just what you can see and imagine with your own eyes and head, it's vast. No need for looking through a telescope to get the sense of vastness - but perhaps you do need the knowledge that stuff is up there - even if you can't see it.
okay, a showerthought:
The ancients treated the stars and planets as Gods. And some of them have the same characteristics - they exist for seemingly eternity, or at least billions of years. They shine light and provide what is necessary for life to start, and for it to go on. They are always up there, 'above', 'watching' as it were (they send rays of light down to the planets, where it is partially absorbed and partially bounced back). And one day, when the Sun goes out, it will end the universe that exists on Earth. Based on what we know now, the ancients seemed to get a lot right in the actual nature of the stars.
> We're getting the to point of exoplanet discovery where you can find a star with your eyes, know which one it is, and check to see how many planets orbit it.
Fomalhaut is a great example. Occasionally I'll take people out for sky tours, and when Fomalhaut is visible I mention to them that not only is that star extraordinarily close (25 ly), but that it has planets that we've actually imaged in photographs!
If it was an acquired thought, it was acquired more than a few thousand years ago. The Bible mentioned uncountable stars; "That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore".
Not sure the bible is a good source for astronomy. But your quote does not say anything about "uncountable stars". I don't know the context but it could simply be read as:
> Your fields will produce lots of seeds, as many as stars (a few thousand) ... or as many as grains of sand (millions).
Nowhere does it say those numbers are equal. Or maybe it means:
> You'll get lots of children (seeds?), as many as stars (9000), or as many as grains of sand (millions, eventually).
Is there an actual quote that says there are uncountable stars?
Context and culture suggest the latter interpretation. It's definitely talking about descendants, not agriculture, and it's definitely using "as many as the stars" in a fashion that suggests a lot more than 9000. Some clearer quotes:
> Deuteronomy 10:22: Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.
Shortly before that quote was written, a census numbered the men at around 600,000, for a total population of 1.5-2.5 million.
And there's also the New Testament interpretation of the same events:
> Hebrews 11:12: Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.
Again. That's the whole point of science. Leaving interpretations out.
Neither you nor anybody here can know if the author meant "There are around 600,000 stars" or "There are around 5,000 stars". Also, exactly who tracked the geneaology to make sure those 600,000 men were direct descendants of the 70 people? Is that sentence possibly false? Was the author aware of the census? etc, etc.
> Not sure the bible is a good source for astronomy.
Agreed. I used the Bible in this context as a source of historical human ideas.
There are lots of similar passages, both in other parts of the Bible, and in other works, that refer to the stars as "uncountable" in some form or another. I used this particular reference because it was the first one I found. :)
You had to wait until goodvtelescope resolve the streak of the Mily Way was made of stars. Ditto that some the smudges in the sky were galaxies made of stars. That was one ofvEdwin Hubble's great discoveries.
This may be part of the confusion there are ~9 galaxies visible to the naked eye and ~13 nebula, but they don't count as a star. Similarly binary stars should only count if you can't see both stars. Remove all the stuff that's not individual stars and there are significantly fewer points remaining.
> At the poles, where the north and south polestars are pinned to the zenith and no stars rise or set, the same ~4,500 stars are visible every single clear night of the year.
Ofcourse, at the poles you have long polar day (midnight sun) in summer - and will generally see only one star during the night: the sun.
Conversely, during polar night, you'll be able to see some stars for most of the day, if not maybe a few bright stars even at noon.
Both polestars are 'new', in the sense that precession brings different stars closer to the pole axis over time.
Sigma Octantis (mag 5.47, ra 21h09m dec −88°57′) is the best South Pole star within (optimistic) naked-eye range. As you can see, it is just over 1° off axis (c.f. Polaris, which is marginally better at c. 3/4° out).
> here in the southern hemisphere, there is no recognised "pole star"
My polar alignment scope has etchings for Sigma Octantis (screenshot from companion iOS app: [1]). Wikipedia also describes Sigma Octantis as a southern pole star [2]. Maybe it's just not as common to refer to Sigma Octantis as a pole star as it is for Polaris, but it does seem to be recognized.
We're talking about pole stars. Being a naked eye star isn't a necessary condition. Choice of a pole star is a balance between brightness and proximity to the pole.
> again no one in the Southern Hemisphere I've every heard of looks up and points at a "pole star"
It's never too late to learn something new. :)
More to the point, "the north and south polestars" would be well understood by much of Sky & Telescope's target audience, and that's who they're writing for. I get that it's going to be less common knowledge outside of their target audience, but that doesn't make the article incorrect, which seems to be what you want to argue.
Just because people don't use it for navigation doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It would be much more complicated to explain the orientation of the southern cross in the article. Pole star is more suitable for use there, so they used it.
This should be easy to verify with sampling: I mean count the stars in a spot in the sky and extrapolate to the rest.
Actually the recent Sky and Telescope article about killer asteroids mentioned another interesting form of sampling. The article said that astronomers have a high confidence that 90% of all large asteroids which cross earth's orbit are known. But how can this be? This is the argument: we "tag" an asteroid when we find it. Then we look for these types of asteroids over some period of time. 90% of the asteroids found in this period are already tagged ones, so we know only 10% remain.
I'm trying to get my head around the reliability of this method- at the very least the sampling has to be non-biased and sensitive.
Kepler, Hubble and a number of other telescopes are placed in space exactly for this reason. They can see the skies much clearly and that they can stay focused on a tiny patch of sky for months and take a vivid picture with the faintest of light from the distant stars.
A sort of Google maps for the heavens. You can download star catalogs with over 150 million stars.
It's amazing what you can do with it. Here's a little movie I made of the 2-day long transit of Uranus across the Sun as viewed from Neptune in the yer 46915: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU9yzUUMhqU
The moon makes up 1e-5 of the visible sky hemisphere. That means there is one star per 11 moon-areas. That seems very low to me. I'd have guessed the ratio was closer to 1:1. I'll check next time I'm out at night!
Keep in mind that area is square, so that's a little over a 3x3 grid of moons. (Well, actually a little smaller, because circles don't pack perfectly.)
Some species of animals use celestial features to navigate or coordinate mating behavior. I think the most notable are sea turtles, whose hatchlings may be confused by artificial lights.
Somnologists also care about light pollution, particularly the colors. One hypothesis is that artificial lighting interferes with health sleep patterns and behaviors.
Bombardiers on nighttime missions do like to have lighted targets to aim at.
...it's not an issue that motivates many people, no.
When they say ‘visible with the naked eye’, do they mean looking straight on or with peripheral vision? Because you can sense more light in your periphery, so that might explain why it seems ‘more’ than about 4500 stars you can see.
No you genuinely can't see more than ~4500 stars. I think we imagine that we can see more stars because we see a lot of photos taken using long exposures that can pick out more stars [1]. A 30 second exposure can bring out several times more stars than the human eye can see.
I’ve been in parts of the country where there’s complete blackness in the new moon. I didn’t stop to count the stars, but it looked much more like the second picture than the first one. The Milky Way is astonishingly vivid and the stars are endless.
The author of that article might claim the first picture is “real” in a physical sense, but even if it was, it ceases to be when transfered to a limited computer screen and viewed in indoor ambient light.
> I’ve been in parts of the country where there’s complete blackness in the new moon. I didn’t stop to count the stars, but it looked much more like the second picture than the first one. The Milky Way is astonishingly vivid and the stars are endless.
I just got back from Exuma Island in the Bahamas. This is a decently remote island without much light pollution. It was by far the best star-gazing I've ever experienced. I've backpacked in Big Bend, Yosemite, and Yellowstone (and less notable areas), Exuma takes the cake for looking at the heavens.
I say all of this because the picture on the left seems much more representative of the _best star-gazing conditions I've ever witnessed_. The Milky Way was big and beautiful; It caused my S.O. and I to sit outside for 1.5 hours just staring. But it still looked more like the first picture.
Maybe you were mis-remembering, or maybe your vision is just better for these sorts of things. Either way, I want to know where you were to see the second picture.
The second photo more closely matches what I see, though it looks more black and white than that. I suspect there is a wide range of night vision as I have watched people stumble around when I thought there was plenty of light.
I've been out in the middle of the savannah in Kenya, with no artificial lights around, and it looked worse than the picture on the left. Night sky photography is best understood as a creative art form, with only the faintest connection to what the sky actually looks like to human eyes.
Neither, they mean total stars you can count if you look all around the night sky. The article says that it's about 9000 stars total, but then the ground blocks our view of the half of the stars that are on the hemisphere on the opposite side of the world.
Peripheral vision (or averted vision as it's usually called) is useful to master in astronomy, often used when looking at feint defuse objects like galaxies through a telescope. As you say, the rods at in peripheral part of the eye are better suited to low light. I'm not sure how well this might work with pointed sources of light like stars though.
If you calculate the diameter of most stars in the night sky, the apparent diameter is on the order of a large molecule held at arm's length. The fact that you can see them at all boggles my mind.
This to me is one of the biggest proofs that the Torah (first part of the Bible) wasn’t just a bunch of legends written by man.
It says that Abraham’s children will be as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the... stars in the sky.
After all, as far as ancient people knew, there were millions (possibly billions) of sand grains by the sea, and ... maybe 5,000 stars?
I am sure Greek astronomers would have laughed at any Jew who said that the number of stars is in the millions and billions.
Yet these days with modern science we have found out that there are as many if not more stars than sand grains.
Now, an atheist would say “that was just an expression”. But who really uses stars as an example of millions, just like sand grains, over and over repeatedly, if they really thought there weren’t that many? It must have been one lucky guess!
There are other proofs but this to me is one of the hardest to explain away.
* EDIT: lots of militant atheists on this site I see, wielding that downvote button rather than engaging in substantive argument
1) Surely the Bible is just making the same mistake I make when looking at the sky - imagining that I'm seeing millions instead of just 9k.
2) If it wasn't just an expression then there are an estimated 300 billion stars in the milky way alone. Astronomers put current estimates of the total stellar population at roughly 70 billion trillion (7 x 1022). I don't see that many descendants of Abraham.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A figure of speech that uses the stars as a reference to a huge number is not extraordinary evidence.
> lots of militant atheists on this site I see, wielding that downvote button rather than engaging in substantive argument
If you want substantive argument you have to start off with a position that is ground in something that could be reasonable. Your position is starting out by extrapolating god from the fact that someone made a wild guess about the number of stars in the sky. That does not seem to invite substantive argument, it merely proves that you have a tendency to leap to - probably - wrong conclusions.
There are not a number of Jews equivalent to the grains of sand nor the stars in the sky (100 billion stars x ??? trillions of galaxies?), either today or in total whom have ever existed. There will never exist a number of Jews equivalent to the number of stars in the universe. There will never at any point in the future exist a total number of people, much less just Jews, who have ever lived to match even close to the number of stars in the universe.
Why are you taking this passage in the Torah to say millions, except for the fact that that's a magnitude that is relatively close to the number of Jews? You're seeing a fit that doesn't exist.
If a Greek astronomer said there were 5000 or 9000 stars, and a Jewish astronomer said there were millions, or even billions, of stars, they would both be as far away from 10^24 (or more) by almost the same magnitude.
The Torah is not giving correct guesstimations of any of these quantities. It's vague and no more accurate than your Greek dude saying, "dunno, maybe 10,000?" It's just saying, "man, you'll have a lot of descendants." If someone told me I'd have between 5000 and 9000 descendants, I'd probably think that was quite a lot.
This doesn't strike me as particularly convincing. If it's good enough for you, then by all means. But it is anything but proof.
Make sure your claim is falsifiable. What would prove it wrong? Maybe finding that the number of stars was different from the number of grains of sand. But how different? If you don't establish the criteria for rejecting the claim, then it's pointless to try and prove it because you'll always find a way to make it look like it's true. If you're not going to think scientifically, then your conclusion is as worthless as any other religious belief.
> Mankind, with hardly an exception, have not remarked the periods of the other stars, and they have no name for them, and do not measure them against one another by the help of number, and hence they can scarcely be said to know that their wanderings, being infinite in number and admirable for their variety, make up time.
A Greek astronomer living at the same time that the Torah was written down would agree that numbers were uncountable. It was a poetic metaphor or hyperbole to mean "uncountably many."
Eg, https://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/books/genesis/genesis1... points out that an Akkadian inscription from around 1280 BCE - which is around the same time that tradition says that the Oral Torah was given to Moses at Mount Sinai (1312 BCE) - says "Thereupon, the land of the Kuti, whose numbers are countless as the stars of heaven"
Or from around 1018 BCE: "In his first year the city of Suru of Bit-halupe rebelled. Assur-nasir-pal captured the city and said, "Öhis heavy spoil, which like the stars of heaven could not be counted, I carried off""
Thus, the account in the Torah appears to be in line with what the Greeks and what others in the Middle East believed - that the number of stars in the sky was beyond counting.
On the other hand, a Greek astronomer after Hipparchus or Ptolemy might have laughed, as their catalogs counted about 1,000 stars. But that was several hundred years after the Torah was written down.
This is what we would expect if the authors of the Torah drew from the general cultural understanding of their era, and does not require some special or hidden connection to a non-human source.
You further posit "who really uses stars as an example of millions, just like sand grains, over and over repeatedly, if they really thought there weren’t that many?"
As I believe I have demonstrated, it wasn't until Hipparchus's star catalogue from about 135 BCE that people in that region of the Earth had the idea that the visible stars might actually be countable. Until then it was used metaphorically to mean "could not be counted."
The Greeks also used the number of grains of sand as a metaphor for "uncountable". For example, Pindar's Olympian 2 ("For Theron of Acragas Chariot Race 476 B. C.") ends "Since the sand of the shore is beyond all counting, who could number all the joys that Theron has given others?"; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... .
There are other metaphors for uncountable. In Olympian 12 the same author uses "I would not know how to give a clear account of the number of pebbles in the sea."
Could you explain what "militant" means? Are you militant? Do you think I am?
I think perhaps the random-like distribution of the stars (position and brightness) suggests a huge number of them, even if you can't see them all. In other words, even without modern cosmological theories you guess that there are many fainter stars which you can't see.
Here I've compiled a distilled version of the cited tables...
If you happen to be in a place/time-of-year to see Uranus (n.b. cool mobile apps exist to help locate celestial bodies), you can probably see at least 4k-5k stars. If you can see Neptune with the naked eye, perhaps you are actually seeing 30k-40k stars.## Notes ##
Each magnitude is 2.5x brighter than the next:
> Mag+01 is 2.5 times brighter than Mag+02
> Mag+01 is 2.5*2.5 times brighter than Mag+03
Mag Scale: http://www.icq.eps.harvard.edu/MagScale.html
Star Count: http://www.stargazing.net/david/constel/howmanystars.html