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The Night Sky
http://the-real-way.com
The first time that you gaze up into the night sky and feel the wonder of the universe is the time when the majority of individuals, even the most venerated professional astronomers, think back to if they think of their early interest in the stars. It is normally a very extraordinary moment, when an adult took you by the hand, pointed at the stars and said: 'Look, that is the Pole Star'.
Country people will probably discover the night sky earlier than city dwellers because the atmosphere over a city is normally so polluted that you cannot see the stars from below. There are two sorts of pollutants that prevent you from seeing the stars in a city, smoke and light. Street lights give off a corona that stops you from seeing the weaker light from the stars beyond.
If you would like to evoke that moment in your life, why not take a child out into the country to look at the stars one night? If you have a pair of binoculars, so much the better, but they are not necessary. If you have forgotten which stars are which, get a book on the topic or a map of the night sky. These days you can get a map of the night's sky for the day that you want.
The night sky really changes each night. The stars and the constellations do not move much, so you should not have too much trouble finding them, but if a planet is passing by, it will be in a different part of the sky each night, which is why it is helpful to get an up-to-date map of the night sky for the date you want to go star gazing.
One of the hardest concepts for a child (or anyone else for that matter to comprehend is the magnitude of the universe - the sheer size of it. Here are a few facts that will amaze most individuals:
1] Our Sun is a star in the galaxy called the Milky Way and it has its own planets revolving about it. However, there are estimated to be 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) stars like our Sun in the Milky Way.
2] The Milky Way is one of approximately tens of billions of galaxies in the universe and the Milky Way is one of the lesser galaxies.
3] It would take over 100,000 years to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other, if you were going at more than five trillion miles per year or over 570 billion miles per hour.
4] It has been worked out that our Milky Way is 14,000,000,000 (fourteen billion) years old
It is very difficult to comprehend astronomical numbers like this but this might help:
1 billion seconds ago, it was 1980
1 billion minutes ago, Jesus had only just passed away
1 billion hours ago, mankind did not exist
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with the Kids Building set. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Smart Toys for Kids.
Article submitted Tuesday, October 04, 2011 & read 116 times.
Owen Jones writes on many subjects and is currently running several websites. He was born in Wales but now lives in northern, rural Thailand.
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» left by Paul Schroeder (207 days 6 hours ago.)
It's taken so very long for that star light to reach us, that we're actually looking at a picture of the universe's night sky, the way it was, many thousands of years ago; very many of those stars, whose light is just reaching us now, may in fact, no longer be there.
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» left by Owen Jones(208)
Yes, fascinating isn't it?
Our window into history.
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