Humanity has been admiring the stars since its appearance. The beauty of the most distant stellar constellations inspired even the first painters: you can find many rock paintings of celestial objects.

Nowadays people know a lot about the stars and even send vessels into space. However, technology development has made some problems in this matter: it is becoming harder and harder to look at the starry sky. The reason of this issue is the constant associate of towns and cities — luminous pollution.

Illumination of buildings, advertisement and street lights, transport — all of this makes the night less dark. The lights of these artificial sources even reach the lower layers of the atmosphere. Many old observatories, such as the Royal Greenwich in London and Pulkovo in St. Petersburg are surrounded by residential housing and cannot operate anymore. As for the citizens — when looking at the sky at night they can see only its brightest objects at best.

But there are still places on our planet that are far away from civilization. There, surrounded by nature itself, you can find real darkness at nighttime, and that is the time when the "kings of the night" — the stars appear.

One of the most favorable places to observe the starry skies is Africa. The famous Sahara Desert, in particular. There are no inhabited places for hundreds of miles. That means absence of lights and smoke fog, which makes the air crystal clear. As a pleasant addition you can also adore the great dunes.

During the cloudless nights you can distinguish the most powerful stellar gathering and the Milky Way, as well as stellar constellations and even separate stars. They cover the sky with a fantastic carpet, shining and reminding of the greatness of the Universe.

Italian scientists determined, that 80% of the human population does not see the real sky! AirPano tried to solve this problem: our 360° time-lapse allows you to look at the stars in all of their magnificence and understand, how our ancestors have seen the sky.

Video by Stanislav Sedov. Photos by Sergey Semenov. Stitching by Ivan Roslyakov

18 September 2019