Introduction:
No matter how far away from your technology, there is always one crucial moment we all return to. That was the first minute we went out when you could see the whole sky and see the sky at night. For people living in cities, this is a profound revelation as if we have found strangers living among us. Most of us are unaware of the immense panorama of the bright night sky when there are no living in the distractions of a city.
Knowledge:
We all love the knowledge of studying the sky using binoculars and various sizes and telescopes. But I bet you can remember as a child for the first time when you saw a full sky with all the clusters of stars, meteors, and comets that come with a much stronger light than before.
A great way to capture the wonder of that moment is to get out of the world with your child who has never had this knowledge and be present and at that moment when they look up and say one powerful word that can summarize their feelings looking at that beautiful sky. That word being - "Wow."
A Child's Mind:
Perhaps the most amazing truth about what a child looks at and the most difficult for them to understand is the sheer magnitude of what is above them and what they stand for. The fact that almost every dot in the sky is another star or the most prominent celestial body on Earth itself, not twice or ten times but by hundreds and thousands, can be confusing to children. Children have enough trouble thinking about the size of the world itself, let alone the big thing.
But when it comes to astronomy, we do much better when we fall into the deepest depths of awe at what we see in the night sky. Some amazing facts about what children are looking at can add to the bumps they already have as they look up at the sky.
Facts:
Some of these facts are:
* Our sun is just one of many galaxies called the Milky Way, which contains 100,000 similar or larger stars.
(https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/beyond/overview/)
* The Milky Way is just one of the 100 billion galaxies, each containing billions of stars. The Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.
(https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/beyond/overview/)
* Scientists estimate that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old.
(https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/01/astronomers-agree-universe-nearly-14-billion-years-old)
These fascinating little facts relate to the mysterious discussion of the origin of the universe and whether it is possible to travel through space or whether there is life on other planets. Can you challenge the children to calculate all of the stars in the Milky Way?
Such a conversation can be fun, exciting, and full of questions. Don'tt is 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 would feel your good moment when you were a child. It can bring an entirely new joy to the stars and you.
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