AstroRig57 wrote:
I'm sorry, but I disagree. You may be able to see a faint vestige of some of the BRIGHTER deep sky objects from light polluted city skies, but they are mere ghosts of what you can see from a true dark sky site. You have to be very selective in what you attempt to share with the public in an urban environment and your choices are severely limited.
You disagree that I could see what I saw? Of course they were not as distinct as under dark skies, and some things were impossible, but it didn’t stop me from trying. But if I could see even a hint of them from the city, I was confident that I could easily find and identify them under dark skies. And that’s what I’m trying to convey, living in the city doesn’t mean that backyard astronomy is closed to you. That’s what John Dobson was trying to show with the Sidewalk Astronomers.
I responded to a poster that thought he had to go to a dark sky area to see the ISS. That is not true. The ISS can often rival Venus in brightness.
And I've advocated for over 30 years that learning the fundamentals of Astronomy in an urban area is easier than in a dark sky environment. In Los Angeles, the primary stars of the constellations were pretty much the only stars available to the naked eye and makes learning them much easier.
LS
ETA: All of this reminds me, in 1979, I found M100 from the deck of our apartment in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood, CA. The following weekend was an LAAS Star Party.
At the SP, I was trying to see how many galaxies I could identify in the Virgo Cluster. While I found a nice Spiral Galaxy where I thought I saw M100 previously, there was an interloping star that I could not identify on the Norton’s Chart, so I just put M100 with a question mark in my logbook and moved on. It turned out that I had been one of the first the see what turned out to be a supernova in M100. I was such a novice that I didn't realize it and I was surrounded by experienced astronomers that could have not only confirmed it but would have been very excited about it.
