Is there a recording of this presentation by any chance?

Unfortunately no. The presentation was shown on the Kyiv Go Meetup - https://www.meetup.com/uagolang/events/251712321/ and it was in Russian. I didn't notice any recorders during the presentation.

Too bad, thank you regardless :)

There is nothing better than being at a place with low light pollution and seeing something like this: http://theartofnight.com/

If you're interested in finding places with low light pollution, check here: https://www.lightpollutionmap.info

What you also need for awesome night-skys is low air-humidity.

So high mountains in a desert are quite good ... I am a bit spoiled by that ..

> There is nothing better than being at a place with low light pollution and seeing something like this.

As far I understand, you can never see with the naked eyes something similar to a long exposure photo. Sure you can get a better outline of the Milky way but you'll never see something that is the result of collecting photons during minutes or hours.

Speaking from memory about experiences is not very precise, but I was shocked when I've seen nightsky on a particulary dark (no moon) night with almost no clouds in a very unpopulated area of Poland.

Usually in the city I can only see like 10 starts, and in a countryside near that city maybe 100, but they are very tiny and sky is black.

In that forest I've seen sky that was mostly stars, some had colors, Milky Way was dim but solid white belt with many stars in it. It was much closer to these long-exposure photos than to a regular night sky with light pollution.

Yes, absolutely, but just reducing the amount of light pollution around you and looking up in the sky is a wildly different experience than, say, looking up somewhere close to a city.

And I would posit that laying on your back with open attention to the night sky in a place free from light pollution is orders of magnitude more moving than any long-exposure photograph. It’s not just the visuals, but the grander sense of being witness to the majesty of where we actually are on this planet.

No, nothing like those long-exposure photos, but the human eye is far more sensitive than any camera, as proven by the fact that we can see the Milky Way at all with sub-second exposures. The number of stars in the sky under clear rural conditions is stunning.

Echoing what others have said in their replies, it is remarkable, the difference when you get somewhere that really has substantially less light pollution. Not just 10 or 20 miles away -- hundreds.

Also, there is nothing between you and it. This is something a picture doesn't fully convey: You are a part of it, in the midst of it, right now -- and every moment of your life, if you could only see it.

It seems trite to say it, these days, but there is a very fundamental component of perspective.

Another source for checking light pollution: http://darksitefinder.com/