Seriously there are! Sitting out on a balcony of the Riu Touareg in Boa Vista, looking South, out across the Atlantic, with minimal light pollution, the star field visible to the naked eye is fairly immense. Although there has been some cloud…. it’s worth waiting for!
According to Pocket Universe (iOS) and NiteSky (iOS) I am looking at Jupiter and her moons; Antares, in the middle of the constellation of Scorpio, and more faintly, Saturn and Pluto. Unfortunately, for much of my stay here, there was a fair bit of cloud, which was a shame, as I had purchased NightCap (iOS) specially for its “Star” mode to get some reasonable images of the night sky. One imagines it is relatively easy to capture mind boggling, crystal clear images of dense star fields….. perhaps if I had a telescope…..!
My own images seem somewhat pathetic. Serious editing, on my return home, may improve them. If so, they will materialise in future edits. In the meantime, here is a screenshot from Pocket Universe 😀
Of course, in addition to this casual, amateur astronomy posting, I am also paying a small degree of homage to the Rickie Lee Jones interview sampled by The Orb in the 1990 ambient masterpiece “Little Fluffy Clouds”.
This was my first and main introduction to the genre, and beyond, discovered during student life at UCLAN in 1992.
Interviewer: “What were the skies like when you were young?”
Jones: “They went on forever – They – When I w- We lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in ’em, and, uh… they were long… and clear and… there were lots of stars at night. And, uh, when it would rain, it would all turn – it- They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere. That’s uh, neat ’cause I used to look at them all the time, when I was little. You don’t see that. You might still see them in the desert.”