Topic > What we see up there in the night sky

No matter how advanced you are in your sophistication as an amateur astronomer, there is always one key moment that we all return to. This was the first time we went out where you could really get a good look at the cosmos and admired the night sky. For city dwellers, this is as profound a revelation as if we discovered that aliens live among us. Most of us have no idea of ​​the vast panorama of lights that dot a clear night sky when there are no city lights to interfere with the view. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Sure, we all love the enhanced experience of studying the sky using binoculars and telescopes of various sizes and powers. But I bet that as a child you remember the first time you saw the clear night sky fully displayed with all the amazing moving constellations, meters and comets and a display of points of light so numerous they could never be counted. rediscovering the wonder of that moment is going out into the countryside with one's own child or with someone who has never had this experience and being there in that moment when they look up and say that word so powerful that it is the only one that can summarize the sensations you get when you see that magnificent sky. That word is: “Wow.” The very fact that almost certainly, virtually every point up there in the sky is another star or celestial body much larger than the Earth itself, not twice or ten times but by factors of hundreds and thousands. , it can be an amazing idea for children. Children have a hard enough time imagining the size of the Earth itself, much less something as vast as space. But when it comes to astronomy, we do better when we fall into deeper and deeper levels of wonder at what we see up there. the night sky. Some surprising facts about what kids are looking at can add to the goosebumps they already feel as they gaze up at the sky. Be like… Keep in mind: This is just one example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Our sun is part of a huge galaxy called the Milky Way that consists of a hundred billion stars just like this one or larger. Show them that one hundred billion is 100,000,000,000 and you'll definitely see some people's jaws drop. The milky galaxy is just one of tens of billions of galaxies, each of which also contains billions of stars. In fact, the Milky Way is one of the small galaxies. If you wanted to cross the Milky Way, it would take you 100,000 years. But you can't get there by sticking to the speed limit. You have to drive five trillion eight hundred million miles a year to cross that fast. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old. These fun little facts should spark a pretty lively discussion about the origins of the Milky Way. universe and the possibility of space travel or whether there is life on other planets. Can you challenge the children to calculate that if each star in the Milky Way had nine planets, and if only one of them was habitable like Earth, what are the chances that life would exist on one of them? I think you'll see some real excitement when they try to manage those numbers.