Walking On The Moon

When astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, they found a landscape of cliffs and plains, completely covered in many places by a fine white dust. This lunar dust was created long ago when the Moon's surface broke up under the impact of meteoroids. Because there is no air, wind, snow or rainon the Moon, the dust never moves- and so the footprints left behind by the astronauts will be there for millions of years.

White Ball Of Rock

The Moon is the biggest, brightest object in the night sky, shining almost like a night-time sun. Yet it has no light of its own. It is just a big cold ball of rock, and it shines only because it reflects the light of the sun. It is Earth's companion in space, about 384,000 km away, and circles around it once a month. As the moves around, it also rotates (turns) slowly on its axis, so that the same face always points towards us. The far side of the Moon can never be seen from the Earth's surfaces.

The Scale Of The Universe

What we can see of a space is only a tiny fraction of what is there. With powerful telescope, intensely bright clusters of stars or galaxies called quasars can be seen 13 billion light-years across.

 So if there are quasars equally far away in all directions, the universe must be at least 26 billion light-years across. The light of some stars, when see through a telescope, may be thousands or even millions of light-years away.

The Sky At Night

Stars appear in the same pattern they have done for many thousands of years - although a few stars, such as Polaris, have shifted slightly since the time of the first ancient Babylonian astronomers.

By studying the sky on a nightly basis, you can learn to identify bright stars, such as Sirius, and even some of the planets in our Solar System , such as Venus and Jupiter, and recognize some of the better known constellations.

Night Sky

The night sky is filled with thousands of points of light twinkling in the darkness. Most are stars-gigantic suns so distant they look tiny. About 2000 stars are visible to the naked eye, but there are trillions more out in space.

Slightly brighter than stars are some of the planets that circle the sun.

The brightest object of all in the night sky is the nearest to earth - the Moon.

PATTERNS OF STARS

To find their way around the night sky, astronomers divide the sky into 88 patterns of stars, or constellations. Many constellations still have the names of the ancient Greek mythical heroes and creatures they were given long ago,such as Orion the hunter. 

There is no particular connection between the stars in a constellation; they just appear close together in the sky.

Orion (The Hunter)