Stargazing in solitude isn't always easy in the Cambrian Mountains. "A few friends and I went up to the local Dark Sky Discovery Site to lie on blankets and watch a meteor shower, but there were so many sheep that we had to lie on the cosy bonnet of the car instead!" says Linda Reid, who runs Glangwili Mansion (glangwilimansion.co.uk), a small luxury country house hotel in Llanllawddog in Carmarthenshire. “They must have thought we were the farmer coming to feed them." Back at Glangwili Mansion there's a feast, both gastronomical and astronomical, in the shape of the Stargazer Cabin in the lush hotel grounds. “We wanted to do something special so we created this wilderness place with evening dining and spectacular skies," says Linda.
Welcome to the Cambrian Mountains Astro Trail, a newly developed 80km-route around an undesignated rural landscape in Wales that covers Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Powys. Most stargazers visiting Wales will have heard about the International Dark Sky Reserves at Snowdonia and the Brecon Beacons. "In Wales we've got the three designated dark-sky areas, but the Cambrian Mountains trumps them all," says Allan Trow at Dark Sky Wales (darkskywalestrainingservices.co.uk), who runs stargazing and astrophotography events. "Its length and breadth is dark and it covers a massive swathe of our country." In the northeast of the Cambrian region is the Elan Valley International Dark Sky Park, one of the three areas in Wales accredited by the International Dark-Sky Association.
Getting away from the lights
Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
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Denne historien er fra April 2022-utgaven av BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Could We Find Aliens by Looking for Their Solar Panels?- Designed to reflect ultraviolet and infrared, the panels have a unique fingerprint
Researchers searching for life beyond Earth spend a lot of time thinking about what telltale signs might be detectable astronomically. Forms of unambiguous evidence for the presence of life on another world are known as biosignatures. By extension, techno signatures are indicators of activity by intelligent, civilisation-building life.
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Particles and corresponding antiparticles are very much alike, except they have opposite electrical charges. For instance, the antiparticle of the electron - known as the positron - has the same tiny mass, but while electrons carry a negative electrical charge, positrons are positively charged.
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The Big Bang produced a Universe filled almost exclusively with hydrogen and helium; all other elements - what astronomers call metals - were produced by stars, supernovae and everything that happens later. So if you can pick out a pristine star with no metals polluting it from among the billions in the Milky Way, then you are likely to have a star dating from our Galaxy's earliest days.
Inside The Sky At Night - Two years ago, exoplanet scientist Hannah Wakeford received some of the first data from the JWST
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