Twenty thousand, only half are visible.
I'm guessing wildly at this, but this is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the best photo I could find showing visibility up to magnitude 8.
Then my approximation of a human view at magnitude 6 from a dark sky site.
Then the same for a cat with blurry vision who can't see all the colors.
Worse than napkin math, but resources for this were strangely hard to find, and I'm not an expert, so don't take any of this as accurate.
But any way you cut it, her sky is so bright and everything is soft and blurred together, like trying to concentrate on something in a dream.
The stars don't move or smell like anything. She doesn't look up while we are outside. I'd be kind of spooked if she did. Instead of stargazing, she spends half an hour cataloging various pisses from the strays and listening to what I think is the sound of the geckos that live in the stonework and creepers.
I cannot perceive these things, but they matter to her, and from the way she lies on the needlework I'm trying to finish, I know she cares about my interests also. The geckos, the pissing, the sewing, the stars, it is all equally important. It all merges in a soft, blurry, bright mass.
We sit in the grass and I get bitten by mosquitoes while she peeps and trills at me in the dark that isn't dark at all.
