How many stars can you see in the Great Square of Pegasus?

The time for the Perseid meteor shower has been and gone (the peak was on the 12/13th August) and I missed out as it was cloudy that night here in Norfolk. The following night at 1.15am BST on the morning of the 14th August I did have a peep outside and was presented with a really clear dark sky that you just don't see that often. Jupiter is now up at this time and it won't be long before it is in our evening sky again. What interested me was just how good the sky transparency was. One of the ways of testing this is to try and see how many stars you can make out with the naked eye within the Great Square of Pegasus which was well placed at this time. This is a good test of your eyesight and a good test of how dark your sky really is. I could see quite a few stars so I decided to spend some time totting them up.

Bob King has described his attempts at doing this in his very good Sky and Telescope article. In the end I counted 9 or 10 and using his list of stars within this asterism I reckon that I was seeing down to magnitude 5.8 which is pretty good.

I used to think we had good dark skies where we are in Norfolk but over recent years I have had to admit that light pollution is getting worse where we are. We have Norwich just about 10 miles away and the lights from this city are getting worse as it expands further out towards the NDR. To the east is Great Yarmouth but that only shows up faintly. Nearby we have some intrusive lights from a local radar station to the north.

When I realistically place our night sky on the Bortle Scale I can see that we are actually approaching a suburban sky (class 5). On better nights we might just be classed as a 4 (rural/suburban transition) but I think that is pushing it as evidenced by the fact that I couldn't see stars fainter than 6th magnitude. I certainly have never seen the Zodiacal Light here and I did try to see M33 with the naked eye but didn't spot it. However, this may be something to try on another dark night. 

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023