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Despite the fact that astronomy is the oldest science, it is still at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but also that of the public at large. Who hasn’t gazed up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered? Having said that though, the ancient people of definitely the northern hemisphere, but probably both hemispheres, knew the movements of the stars and planets more profoundly than most of us do nowadays.

They understood even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars appear to appear in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ’stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they went ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were not the same as those visible in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 - 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the heavenly bodies than the average common man of today does. (I mean men and women here, of course).

They learned how to calculate or at least locate the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, probably to facilitate the location of certain positions of the sun or other planets or stars, which may have been important to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for studying the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to observe things millions of miles away that no person had ever seen before. Because of the conclusions he came to from his observations, he had trouble with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so outrageous were his discoveries.

But humankind was not to be put off, and since then we have gone on to build ever bigger and ever better astronomical telescopes with which we can even detect radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, infrared waves and gamma waves from outer space. Forty years ago, we even travelled to our Moon. and we have sent probes to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to quite a few comets and asteroids.

Where are we going next? That decision was always up to the government of the United States and the old Soviet Union, but now there are other players in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be just a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of flux and power may be shifting from its traditional seats in the West, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times for the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy exciting.

Fascinated by astronomy, please pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com

Astronomy is a very exact science, although a lot of people get involved with it when they are quite young. Astronomy is a thought-provoking hobby that can teach children about the sciences in general. A number of astronomical subjects interest kids and movies like Star Wars and they only serve to increase this attraction.

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.

Consider Sol, our own star, the sun. The distance between our home and the sun is huge, although it varies from 91 to 94 million miles. The reason for the variance is the Earth’s elliptical orbit. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun provides both light and heat to the planets. A little known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass in the solar system. That is massive!

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, just empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the size of our galaxy, is empty.

Our Earth is located somewhere in the neighbourhood 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 after the thick group of stars in the main section of it.

It resembles a pool of liquid, which is why it was named 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 fact, there’s more information out there than a child could ever get through.

Fascinated by astronomy? Then why not pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com