Amateur Astronomy

Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 3:13 pm

Astronomy is a serious science. Amateur astronomy is a thought provoking pursuit that can teach them about the sciences in general. Kids are naturally drawn to many aspects of astronomy. These include the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies.

The Earth's closest neighbor is the moon. It orbits our planet once every 27.3 days. Because it is so close, it is the only space object that a human has ever walked on, other than Earth of course. One of the important benefits of our relationship with the moon is the tides it causes. It's one of the first objects that can spark a kid's interest in astronomy because it can be clearly seen with the human eye.

Then there's our sun. The gap between our home and the sun is very large. We are between 91 and 94 million miles from the sun. The reason for the variance is Earth's elliptical orbit. Without the sun there would be no life on Earth. The sun provides both light and heat to the planet. Most people don't realize that the sun accounts for around 98% of all the mass in the solar system. Think about how small a person is compared to that.

Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called the Milky Way. It's full of space stuff. But most of the galaxy is empty nothingness. That's a lot of nothing because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and 3,000 light years deep. We're somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 light years from galactic central core. Even with all that space there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The galaxy's name comes from the many stars near the center. From Earth it looks like a Milky Way, a large pool of milk. There are four types of galaxies buy drugs without a prescription – elliptical, lenticular, irregular and like the Milky Way, spiral.

You can find a wealth of resources for amateur astronomy on the internet. In fact there are many star charts, charting programs, images, videos, and other resources .