Bortle Dark-Sky Scale

This is about 10, 15 minutes outside of town where I live here.

So the Bortle, there was no moon in the sky whatsoever.

It was a new moon.

And I think it was a Bortle, I want to say three area, maybe three.

Like it certainly wasn't the best of conditions because that glow you see in the bottom of the frame, I actually toned that down a lot because, you know, other cities, communities, maybe even the city of Toronto might've been affecting it.

You know, so there was a glow there, but I was able to mask or cover it up somehow through masking and whatnot.

So it's 30 seconds to our exposure, that would be 120 frames stacked up.

And now, that's from a Bortle two location, so a very dark location.

Are you there with, like, a bulb meter? Are you actually doing that, or are you just-

So the interesting part, and this is where if we get into the class, like, I know I talked in the class that we're gonna probably have more advanced ones, as long as there's interest.

Y- because the sensors are so small, it just doesn't work.

As soon as you get above about a Bortle five, you're gonna see stars, but you're not going to see that.

It just doesn't, doesn't, doesn't happen.

Mm-hmm.

Because you never know where people are either, but now I did put in cha- in, in the, uh, YouTube chat a link for a light pollution map that makes it-

Yep

... kinda easy to find your Bortle number.

Yep.

... um, it is interesting though, like you said, uh, there's no windows in a submarine.

You were probably under some, you know, Bortle zero skies at some point, if there ever is such a thing.

Um, it'd be kind of interesting to be able to like just, you know, surface that telescope, or surface that sub for a couple hours, pop a telescope up on the deck and, and take some pictures.

Yeah, you'd, you'd, you'd have to have some pretty good, um, a, a much better mount than we normally have since you'd have to-

there are nine different levels on this scale that we use to sort of delineate the quality of the skies at night.

So what is the Bortle scale for people-

Yeah

... who haven't heard of this funny-sounding thing?

The Bortle scale, and I just love the word Bortle-

Yeah

... because it sounds like, it sounds like it should be a space word, and it- it's actually-