Cruise ships should be wired up for stargazing

by philg

One of the luxuries of being out at sea in the old days was seeing stars that would never be visible from light-polluted cities. Cruise ships don’t offer this, though, because they don’t want people stumbling and falling on the upper/outer decks.

The officers of Empress of the Seas talked about trying to darken the top deck for stargazing during a ferry trip (crew-only). It turned out to be impossible. “Every time we thought we’d turned off some lights with a breaker, an emergency system would come on and replace them. We ran around for about an hour trying to turn off individual switches, but gave up.”

In case any future cruise ship engineers happen to read this… how about a system where a top deck area can be darkened for 15 minutes? Passengers can walk up there for an event. Once they’re all comfortably established on the ubiquitous lounge chairs, the crew can kill the lights.


7 thoughts on “Cruise ships should be wired up for stargazing”

  1. This is going to be tough. Can’t kill the navigation lights many of which are white on big ships. Even the anchor light is all around white..

  2. I remember once I was on a 4-day live-aboard in the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles from shore (near Flower Gardens reef). We had done a night dive and as we were in the water waiting to get back on the boat, I looked up and thought I saw clouds in the sky. It was the milky way, and I’d never seen it so clearly.

  4. For that to happen, it would require passengers who knew what stars were. That kind of knowledge of basic science would make them unemployable & unable to afford a cruise. Knowing what a telescope was would put them in PhD territory, very poor.

  5. Lion: As the Chinese say, “poor as a professor; dumb as a Ph.D.”

    Finn: Dark is pretty much the standard config for an aircraft cockpit during night VFR. Stargazing is fantastic from a Robinson R44, for example. The Cirrus isn’t quite as good due to the big LCDs, but when turned down to the minimum there are still a lot more stars visible than from a typical backyard.

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