[Daub]

When I lived in the Welsh countryside, there were occasional nights where I could not see my hand in front of my face. The requirements were that it was new moon, and that there was slight fog. We also lived deep in a valley, which helped. I had great fun navigating my way to the local pub in complete darkness.

The odd thing is that when I recount that experience, some people refuse to believe me. Of course they are all city dwellers.

[Cthulhu_]

I've experienced that once in a simulated environment; there's a museum in Nijmegen that has an indoor setup to simulate being completely blind, you get a stick and a guide and have to navigate a living room and the like. Can recommend if you're interested in accessibility and the like!

[chrisandchris]

In Switzerland, there are two restaurants called "Blinde Kuh" (blind cow), where it's completely dark and you'll get served by blind/visually impaired people. There even work visually impaired people in the kitchen (besides "regular" seing people). It's a fascinating wxperience.

[55555]

There's a similar experience at Tochoji Temple in Fukuoka city.

[liamwire]

Highly recommend the experience, it was darkness unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Excuse the phrasing.

[chasd00]

During a new moon parts of West Texas out in the chihuahua desert are like this. If you wait a solid 45 min with no light for your eyes to adjust it’s amazing how much you can see in the sky.

[m463]

peril-sensitive sunglasses wouldn't help!

[madaxe_again]

I live that experience daily. I live in a very remote corner of Portugal - we are between bortle 2 and 3 - in the bottom of a deep, steep valley.

And yes - when it’s a new moon and the haze from the river blots out the stars, the experience is quite akin to having gone blind. In fact, it’s so dark I’ve used some of those nights to develop film at the outdoor sink.

One thing I’ve noted is that wildlife needs to see just as much as we do - I mean, obvious, right? - but those nights are always dead silent. No birds, no insects, no rustles of this that or the other in the undergrowth. Every little noise one makes seems an affront to the cloying, thick darkness. Perhaps it’s the same instinct at play.

My place in wales used to have dark skies, even fairly recently - but LED street lighting along rural roads has put paid to that. I earnestly don’t understand why a lane that sees zero foot traffic and perhaps one car during darkness hours needs a streetlamp every ten meters - while waste collections only happen every six weeks.

Ah, I have become a grumpy old astronomer.

[zeristor]

I looked up bortle and Portugal, and Google gave my a light pollution map. I still don’t know what bortle means…

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

[bastih]

https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/bortle.html