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Although 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 looked up at the stars 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 better than most of us do nowadays.

They understood even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars appear to rise 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 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, naturally).

They learned how to work out 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 vital to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for looking at the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to see things millions of miles away that no person 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 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 will we go next? That decision was always up to the government of the United States and the old USSR, but now there are other contestants in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be only a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of change and power may be moving from its traditional seats in the West, but it has not lessened 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.

If you are interested in astronomy, then why not pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com

Astronomy is an interesting science to most people because it is filled with many fun astronomy facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the make-up of distant planets has been established. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten your friends.

The Sun is a great font for astronomy fun facts. Our own star, which provides us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody has measured the exact distance, but rather because the Earth revolves around the Sun in an ellipse, an uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

The Sun is only of average size for a star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As average as it is, it accounts for about 98% of all the matter in our solar system. Even with the huge planet of Jupiter on our side, we’re still a measly 2% of non Sun material.

It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to measure across this average Sun. The solar winds produced by the Sun extends to about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In other words, those solar winds reach out about 50 AU’s, with an AU being the distance from the Earth to the sun. That’s quite fantastic, isn’t it?.

How about astronomy fun facts that don’t have anything at all to do with the Sun then? What about our Moon? It’s the only object that man has walked on except the Earth until now. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but has never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker really liked the Moon but was not found acceptable as an astronaut. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are many more astronomy fun facts about the Moon. It’s where what might become the oldest footprint known to man. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind left a footprint or shoe print in the Moon’s dust that will probably still be visible in 10 million years time.

Many people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still believed the Moon to be made of cheese. And finally the suits worn by the Moon-walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the Moon, because of the reduced gravity on the Moon. Talk about an instant diet, eh?

Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close astronomical neighbours. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that their light takes a million years to get to Earth. Some of the stars you see may literally be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there any more. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite staggering.

There are thousands of astronomy fun facts that we could relate. But, unfortunately, this article can not be that long. So, please, walk out there at night, look upwards and learn more about astronomy for yourself.

Interested in astronomy, then why not pop along to our website at: Astronomy Today

Prior to their adoption of the Western solar calendar scheme, the Chinese almost wholly followed their own lunar calendar for determining the times of planting and harvesting and festival holidays. Although people in China today use the Western calendar for almost all business, governmental and practical matters of daily life, the old arrangement still serves as the basis for working out numerous seasonal holidays. This coexistence of two calendar schemes has long been acknowledged by the people of China.

However, this does not only apply to China, it also occurs in most other Eastern countries, like Thailand, and most Arabic countries.

A lunar month is determined by measuring the period of time needed for the moon to complete its full cycle of 29 and a half days, a standard that makes the lunar year a full eleven days shorter than its solar counterpart. This difference is corrected every 19 years by the addition of seven lunar months.

The 12 lunar months are further divided into 24 solar divisions characterized by the four seasons and times of heat and cold, all of which bear a close relationship to the yearly cycle of agricultural work.

The Chinese calendar – very much like the Hebrew calendar- is a mixture of the solar and lunar calendars in that it attempts to have its years concur with the tropical year and its months agree with the synodic months. It is not surprising that a few similarities exist between the Chinese and the Hebrew calendar.

For example, an average year has 12 months, a leap year has 13 months. An ordinary year has 353, 354, or 355 days, a leap year has 383, 384, or 385 days. When working out what a Chinese year will be like, one must make a number of astronomical calculations.

First of all, you have to work out the dates of the new moons. In these cases, a new Moon is the completely black Moon (that is to say, when the Moon is in conjunction with the Sun), not the first visible crescent, as is used by the Islamic and Hebrew calendars. The date of a new moon is then the first day of a new month.

The reason why the majority of countries which had their own calendars had to dump them in favour of the Western, Julian calendar that we use today, is business. First the British and then the Americans ran international business and they used the Julian calendar.Anyone who wanted to work with them had to follow suit. This is why national policy often varies from local custom in Third World countries.

The government desires to trade on the International markets, but the normal family in the country can not. So, the government adopted the Julian calendar but the people only pay lip service to it. I live in Thailand and people here do not even use the 24 hour day divided into two halves. Their day has four sections of six hours each and the first part starts at 6AM, not midnight. Therefore, they have four 4 o’clocks a day, for example and no 7 o’clocks. They are also 543 years ahead of us, although this is more common, for instance in Muslim countries.

If you are interested in astronomy, then please pop along to our website at: Astronomy Today