Astronomy For Teens.

Astronomy is a very serious branch of science, although many people get involved with it when they are quite young. Astronomy is a thought-provoking hobby that can teach children about the other sciences in general. Certain astronomical subjects inspire kids and movies like Star Wars and they only increase this interest.

The Earth’s closest neighbour is the moon. Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty-seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever set foot on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth is responsible for the tides. Its brightness in the night sky attracts many children to learn more about it and the subject of astronomy in general.

Then there’s our sun. Earth is quite far from the sun. The distance varies between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles, although these measurements are not completely accurate. They are inaccurate measurements, because the Earth orbits the sun is in an uneven ellipse. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun, because it provides us with important elements such as light and heat. It is not a well-known fact that the sun contains about 98% of all the mass available in the solar system. Think about how small a person is compared to that – it is truly imponderable!

Our planet is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a very large collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, only empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the volume of our galaxy, is nothingness.

The Earth is situated somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 light years from the very centre of our galaxy. The emptiness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it.

It resembles a pool of liquid, which is why it was called the Milky Way. There are four kinds of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like our Milky Way, spiral.

There is a great deal of information about astronomy on the Internet that is fit for children: it ranges from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show the paths of the different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In deed, there’s more information out there than a child could ever get through.

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Astronomy: Picture of the Day

Astronomy is the study of the universe. It is a serious science, but also an enjoyable hobby. Therefore, whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to people, they usually accept it. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.

NASA of course is a primary source for an astronomy picture of the day. This site NASA.gov shows a new image each and every day. There’s also another section that shows video footage. This could be used to create your own image site. Saturn’s moon Enceladus was featured on November 5, 2008.

The image was taken by a passing spacecraft. It gets down to details the size of a bus. The ice on this moon reflects nearly 100% of all the light that hits it. Wear sunglasses. This moon is so fascinating that Cassini will continue to fly by for more photos later in its mission.

NASA keeps an archive of all the astronomy picture of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of’95. It was a ‘what if’ photo of the Earth posing as a neutron star. The footage is a computer generation. The most fascinating feature is that the constellation of Orion is visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light around it. This causes some objects to be seen twice.

The entry for September 8th,’95 was an amazing picture of the central part of the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is normally invisible because of the dust masking it. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced that amazing photo of our very symmetrical galaxy.

The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1st, 2000 and January 1st, 2001. The explanation why both dates shared this picture is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium.

However, the third millennium actually started on January 1st, 2001. NASA reasoned it was just better to just go with the flow and do it on both dates. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows mankind’s view of the universe as it grew from mere objects circling the Earth, all the way to the ‘Big Bang’ creating the universe as we see it today.

NASA has many more days with their own astronomy picture of the day. Visit the web site, NASA.gov to see them.

Astronomy: pictures of the day are fascinating to vast numbers of people. If you are fascinated by astronomy, visit our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Some Facts on Astronomy

How many facts are there to be known or learned about all the objects and phenomenon in our entire universe? Just think: there are about 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars; then there are many of those stars that have planets in orbit around them. Then consider the moons that orbit those planets and the comets and asteroids, the galaxies these stars form, the nebulae and black holes and everything else that’s out there. The amount of information and data is really quite mind-boggling. This article definitely will not contain every fact about astronomy, but they are very interesting facts nevertheless.

Shall we start by taking a look at a small aspect of astronomy: which are the brightest stars seen from the Earth? – except the Sun, that is, which is just about 250,000 times nearer than the next closest star. In fact, it is so bright that when the sky is viewed from the Earth, it’s light blinds out all the other stars in the sky during a phenomenon called daytime.

So, while reading this list, please bear in mind that according to the scale we are using, lower numbers are brighter: the Sun would be roughly -26.73, whereas the full moon is about -12.6; keeping that in mind, here are the top 5:

#5 is Vega, which means “falling eagle” in Arabic is in Lyra. It’s roughly 25 light years away and has a magnitude of 0.04.

When considering these astronomical facts, please remember that ‘brightest from Earth’ doesn’t mean largest or brightest. The Sun is not the largest or brightest star in the universe or even the galaxy, yet it appears so bright because it is so near compared to other stars.

#4 Rigel Kentaurus is a very bright, bluish-white supergiant star in the constellation of Orion. It is a binary star, with an average apparent magnitude of 0.12. It’s scientific name is Beta Orionis. ‘Rigel Kentaurus’ is Arabic for the ‘foot of the centaur’. It’s about four light years from Earth.

#3 is Arcturus. The name is Latin/Greek and means ‘guardian of the bear’. This star is roughly 37 light years away. It is in the constellation of Bootes, behind The Great Bear. It has a magnitude of 0.00

#2 Canopus. Of these top five, Canopus, the Greek name for the pilot of the vessel Argo made famous in the stories about Jason and the Argonauts, is the brightest. But it’s 313 light years from Earth, so it’s just second on this list as seen from Earth. It has a magnitude of -.62 as seen from this planet.

#1 is Sirius, which translate from the Greek as ’scorching’. It’s also sometimes called the ‘Dog Star’ because it is the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major, which means ‘The Big Dog’ in Latin. It is situated only 9 light years from Earth, which makes it easily the second closest of these top five. It has a magnitude of -1.44, which makes it very easily the brightest star that can be observed in the night sky.

These facts don’t even scratch the surface on the subject of astronomy but it’s something to think about anyway the next time you look up into the sky at night.

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Astronomy Fun Facts

Astronomy is an interesting science to many people because it is stuffed with many fun astronomy facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the make-up of distant planets has been recorded. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten your friends.

The Sun is a great source of astronomy fun facts. Our own star that provides us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows the distance exactly. It’s that the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical, uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

The Sun is only of average size for a star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As average as it is, it accounts for about 98% of all the matter in our solar system. Even with the huge planet of Jupiter on our side, we’re still a tiny 2% of non Sun material.

It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to stretch across this average Sun. The solar winds produced by the Sun reaches out about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or put another way, those solar winds reach out about 50 AU’s, with an AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth. That’s quite fantastic, isn’t it?.

What about astronomy fun facts that don’t have anything at all to do with the Sun then? What about our Moon? It’s the only object that man has walked upon except the Earth until now. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but has never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker loved the Moon but was not found acceptable as an astronaut. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are many more astronomy fun facts about the Moon. It’s the site of what may become the oldest footprint known to man. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind left a print in the Moon dust that will probably still be there in 10 million years time.

Lots of people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still thought the Moon to be made of cheese. And finally, the suits worn by the Moon-walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the Moon, because of the Moon’s reduced gravity. Talk about losing weight, eh?

Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close astronomical neighbours. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that their light takes a million years to reach us. Some of the stars you see may literally be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite staggering.

There are millions of astronomy fun facts and we could go on about them forever. But unfortunately, this article can not. So, please, just get out there and learn more about astronomy for yourself.

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