Easy Astronomy Blog

I had a request for more content on Picture of the day so I’m sharing some amazing shots with you here. Click the pictures to see them full size.

Orion’s belt

Explanation : Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have intriguing and some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower left. The famous Orion Nebula itself lies off the bottom of this star field that covers about 4.5×3.5 degrees on the sky. This image was taken last month with a digital camera attached to a small telescope in Switzerland, and better matches human color perception than a more detailed composite taken over 15 years ago.

The next one is truely incredible

Saturn’s Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters

Explanation : What lies at the bottom of Hyperion’s strange craters? Nobody knows. To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in late 2005 and took an image of unprecedented detail. That image, shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The slight differences in color likely show differences in surface composition. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.

Largest Full Moon of 2008

Explanation : As viewed from a well chosen location at sunset, October’s gorgeous Full Moon rose behind Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California. Captured in this lovely telescopic view, historic Lick Observatory is perched on the mountain’s 4,200 foot summit, observatory and rising Moon momentarily sharing the warm color of filtered sunlight.

Milky Way Road Trip

Explanation : In search of planets and the summer Milky Way, astronomer Tunç Tezel took an evening road trip. Last Saturday, after driving the winding road up Uludag, a mountain near Bursa, Turkey, he was rewarded by this beautiful skyview to the south. Near the center, bright planet Jupiter outshines the city lights below and the stars of the constellation Sagittarius. Above the mountain peaks, an arcing cloud bank seems to lead to the Milky Way’s own cloudy apparition plunging into the distant horizon. In Turkish, Uludag means Great Mountain. Uludag was known in ancient times as the Mysian Olympus.

Astronomy is a serious science. Many people get involved with it when they are very young. Astronomy for kids is a thought provoking pursuit that can teach them about the sciences in general. For children, many parts of astronomy are magical and thus a huge draw. These include the solar system, planets, comets, meteorites, asteroids, stars, the sun, galaxies and of course our closest neighbor in space, the moon.

The Earth’s closest neighbor is the moon. It orbits our planet once every 27.3 days. Being so near, it has hosted the only human footsteps on a space object other than the Earth. One of the significant 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. It’s not an inaccurate measurement, it’s because the Earth orbits in an uneven ellipse. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun provides both light and heat to the planet. Most people don’t realize that the sun accounts for approximately 98% of all the mass in the solar system. What a hog.

Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called the Milky Way. It’s full of space stuff. Even with all this stuff to fill it, it’s mostly empty. At over 100,000 light years wide and 3,000 light years high, that means the galaxy contains a whole lot of nothing. 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. In fact the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it. People thought it looked like a stream of milk, so called it the Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies : elliptical, lenticular, irregular and like the Milky Way, spiral.

You can find a wealth of resources for astronomy for kids on the world wide web. In fact there are so many star charts, charting programs, images, videos, and other resources that a kid would be a senior citizen before seeing all of it.