How many stars we see depends on how dark our sky is, how transparent, and how much water vapour is in the atmosphere.
These are the qualities of the sky
We can see about 3800 stars with our unaided eye from Wairapa, and about 3400 from Northern Hemisphere’s darkest places simply because here the centre of the Milky Way can go overhead and with it the bulk of fourty-billion stars at the centre of it.
Milky-Way.Kiwi operates from within the Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve, and our sky is as dark as it gets.
We stargaze from the Wairarapa Dark Sky Reserve, near Wellington. New Zealand stretches across several degrees of latitude—“from Cape Reinga to The Bluff” (roughly from the 29th to the 52nd parallel). Because of this, the same stars appear at slightly different altitudes in the sky depending on where you are in the country. Wairarapa sits almost in the middle. The further south you go, the higher the South Celestial Pole appears above the horizon. Head north, closer to the Equator, and the South Celestial Pole sinks lower in the sky.
The Moon is the biggest challenge for observing the Milky Way and faint deep-sky objects. Its bright light washes out dim celestial features, making them harder to see. Despite this, the Moon isn’t actually very reflective. According to NASA, its albedo—the measure of how much light an object reflects compared to what it receives—is only 0.07. This means the Moon reflects just 7% of the sunlight that hits it. And yet, it’s still dazzlingly bright in our night sky!
