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 about something larger? 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 the majority of us do nowadays.

They understood even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars seem 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 travelled ‘against the flow’.

They also named clusters of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were not the same as those seen 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 celestial bodies than the average common man of our times. (I mean men and women here, of course).

They discovered how to calculate or at least find the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with massive stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the UK, 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 one had ever seen before. Because of the deductions he drew from his observations, he clashed with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so radical were his discoveries.

But humankind was not to be intimidated, and since then we have gone on to construct 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, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times in the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy exciting.

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Astronomy is a very serious branch of science, although many people become interested in it when they are very young. Astronomy is inspiring pursuit that can show children about the other sciences in general. Certain astronomical subjects interest kids and movies like Star Wars and they only 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 walked on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth causes 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 holds 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, 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.

We’re situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30,000 light years from the very centre of our galaxy. The nothingness 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 looks just like a pool of liquid, which is why it was given the name Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

There is a lot of information on 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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