No matter how far you have progressed in your development as an amateur astronomer, there is always one important moment we all return to. That was the first time we went out where you could see the sky clearly and take the sky at night. For urban dwellers, this is a profound revelation, as if we have found aliens living among us. Most of us are not aware of a large panorama of lights shining in the clear night sky when no city lights are present.
Surely we all love the advanced knowledge of reading the sky using telescopes with various sizes and powers of telescopes. But I bet you can remember as a child that for the first time when you see a bright night sky with amazing clusters of stars, meters, and a comet with a dazzling comet and exposure to light dots is too much to count.
The best way to repeat the miracle of that moment is to get out of the world with your child or have never had this experience and be present at that moment when he looked up and said that very powerful word. Only one could summarize their feelings as they gazed upon the magnificent sky. That word says - "Wow".
Probably the most astonishing truth about what a child looks at is also the most difficult to understand, the magnitude of what is beyond him and what he stands for. The very fact that almost every dot in the sky is a star or a celestial body much larger than the Earth itself, not twice or ten times but by hundreds and thousands of elements, can be a thought-provoking concept. In children. Children have a hard time figuring out the size of the universe itself, not to mention something as unique as outer space.
But when it comes to astronomy, we do so at best if we fall into the deep and deep levels of fear that we see in the night sky. Some amazing facts about what children look at can add to what they already have when they look at the sky. Facts like ...
* Our sun is just one of many galaxies called the Milky Way, with its 100 billion or more stars. Show them that one hundred billion is 100,000,000,000, and you will see some jaws weak.
* Milky Way was just one of the billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars in it. The Milky Way is one of the few galaxies in the universe.
* If you wanted to drive across the Milky Way, it would take you 100,000 years. But you can't get there when you drive the speed limit. You have to drive five trillion, eight hundred million miles a year to cross fast.
* Scientists estimate that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old.
These little pleasurable facts should have a profound effect on the origin of the universe and the possibility of space travel or the existence of other planets. Would you challenge children to calculate that if all the stars in the Milky Way were supporting the nine planets and if one of them did not exist as earth, how much more likely would life be in one of them? I think you will see real joy when they try to use those numbers.
Such a conversation can be fun, exciting, and full of questions. Don’t be too quick to close their minds, as this is the birth of a lifelong love of the stars they face. And if you were there for the first time when they saw that night sky, you will also feel your great moment as a child. And it may start a new interest in astronomy for you too.
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