Places · Impact site
Nördlinger Ries
A 24 km crater with a town built inside it. Apollo astronauts trained here, and the church in Nördlingen is built of impact breccia full of tiny diamonds.
- Where
- Bavaria, Germany
- Coordinates
- 48.88°N 10.57°E
- Age
- 15 million years ago
- On the map
- Show me
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 4 — suburban edge, Bortle 4–5, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.7–6.5. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
Against that sky 99 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 100 in a 130mm, with 21 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 337 km south-east of here.
Between 12 June and 30 June the Sun never gets eighteen degrees below the horizon from this latitude, so there is no astronomical darkness at all for those 19 nights. Nothing faint is observable in that window, however far you drive from the nearest town.
The galactic centre tops out at 12° from this latitude — low enough that the busiest part of the Milky Way is always behind the most atmosphere, which is what separates this sky from a southern one. Of the 110 Messier objects, 19 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Owl Nebula, Sunflower Galaxy and Spindle Galaxy, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Whirlpool Galaxy, Little Dumbbell and Pinwheel Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 48.88°N 10.57°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Nördlinger Ries?
Everything south of declination −41°. From 48.9°N that is a cap 49° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 17% of the whole celestial sphere. It is out of reach permanently rather than seasonally: no time of year and no instrument brings it above the horizon. The matching 17% around the north celestial pole is the same geometry inverted, and never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Nördlinger Ries get?
Anything from 11 hours 53 minutes down to none whatsoever. Around 21 December the night is as long as it gets here, and around 12 June the sky simply never finishes darkening — a problem no amount of driving solves, because it is the Sun's depression angle and not the streetlights. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise.
When is the Milky Way best from Nördlinger Ries?
August and early September, which is a compromise rather than an optimum. The core transits at local midnight around 17 June wherever you are, but 48.9°N spends that part of the summer without any astronomical darkness at all, so the peak is unusable. The workable window opens when the nights return and closes as the core sinks into the evening twilight — a few weeks, and the reason northern observers travel.
How far is Nördlinger Ries from the other sites on this map?
Its closest neighbour on this map is ESOC — European Space Operations Centre, 179 km away to the north-west. The nearest other impact site is Chelyabinsk airburst, 3,470 km to the north-east. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.