NavList:

I would be very surprised if the artist screwed up the positional astronomy / celestial navigation problem here (since that is trivial with an almost endless array of software), and that's probably what you were asking. You just set the latitude, and then run the time function until the Sagitarrius Milky Way is in view. In fact, the only non-trivial task is getting the compass direction right, but that's not too difficult today. Of course, if you read his commentary, he tries to suggest that he actually travelled to locations with the same latitudes as those cities to acquire his dark sky imagery. Yeah, sure.

The sky shots in these composites are rather long time exposures. The visual appearance is nothing like the real sky. At a guess, the limiting magnitude here is about 11 or 12 which is way beyond what the human eye can see. Have a look at the handle of the "teapot" in the San Francisco image. With the unaided eye, even from a dark sky site, only a couple of stars are visible inside the handle. His image shows hundreds. This is "Milky Way wallpaper" glued up behind some cityscapes. Makes for groovy posters, but even if you could turn out the city lights, that's not what you would see.

-FER

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