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Astronomy is the study of the universe. It is a serious science, but also a very pleasurable hobby. Therefore, whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to people, they usually accept it. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.

Of course ,NASA is one of the primary sources for an astronomy picture of the day. This site, NASA.gov, shows a new photo each and every day. There is also a section that shows videos. These could be used to create your own photo site. For example, Saturn’s moon Enceladus was the feature with “star billing” on November 5, 2008.

This image was taken by a passing rocket. It can reproduce details the size of a bus. The ice on this moon reflects as glare, nearly 100% of all the sun light that strikes it. So you would need to wear sunglasses! This moon is so fascinating that Cassini will continue to fly by for more pictures later on in its mission.

NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy footage of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of’95. It was a ‘what if’ picture of the Earth posing as a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light all the way around it. This causes some double vision.

September 8,’95 was an amazing picture of the central part of the Milky Way galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is normally invisible because of the dust obscuring it. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced that fantastic image of our very symmetrical galaxy.

The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1st, 2000 and January 1st, 2001. The explanation why both dates shared this photo is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium.

However, the third millennium actually commenced on January 1st, 2001. NASA reasoned it was just better to just go with the flow and do it on both dates. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html depicts mankind’s view of the universe as it progressed from mere objects circling the Earth, all the way to the ‘Big Bang’ creating the universe as we see it today.

NASA has a lot more days with their own astronomy picture of the day. Visit the web site, NASA.gov to see them.

Astronomy: pictures of the day are fascinating to huge numbers of people. If you are fascinated by astronomy, go along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Astronomy is a very exact branch of science, although many people become interested in it when they are very young. Astronomy is inspiring pursuit that can teach children about the other sciences in general. Some astronomical subjects inspire kids and movies like Star Wars and they serve to increase this attraction.

The Earth’s closest neighbour is the moon. Its path around the Earth takes a little over twenty-seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever set foot on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth is responsible for the tides. Its brightness in the night sky encourages many children to want to learn more about it and the subject of astronomy in general.

Let’s move on to the sun. Earth is quite far from the sun, although the distance actually fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles. The reason for this variance is because of Earth’s elliptical orbit. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun, which is our source of important elements such as light and heat. A little-known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass of the whole solar system! Just think about how small a person is compared to that.

The Earth is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies, it’s a very large collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. In other words, most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the size of our galaxy, is empty.

Our Earth is located somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it.

It looks just like a pool of liquid, which is why it was given the name Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

There is a lot of information about astronomy on the Internet that is fit for children: from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show the paths of the different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In deed, there’s more information than a child could ever get through.

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For most people astronomy is an interesting science filled with loads of astronomy fun facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the makeup of distant planets has been established. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten people.

The Sun is a fantastic source of astronomy fun facts. Our own star, which supplies us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows the exact distance. It’s because the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical, uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

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

It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to stretch across this average Sun. The solar winds created by the Sun extends to about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or put another way, 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 much to do with the Sun then? How about our Moon? It’s the only non-Earth object that man has walked on until now. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker really liked the Moon but was rejected as an astronaut. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes were sprinkled over the Moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

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

Many people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still believed the Moon is 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 Moon’s reduced gravity. Talk about losing weight, 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 reach Earth. Some of the stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there any more. There are more than 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite awesome.

There are millions of astronomy fun facts and we could go on about them forever. But unfortunately, this article can not. So, please, just get out there and learn more about astronomy for yourself.

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How many facts are there to be known or learned about all the objects and phenomenon in our entire universe? Just think: there are about 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars; then there are many of those stars that have planets in orbit around them. Then consider the moons that orbit those planets and the comets and asteroids, the galaxies these stars form, the nebulae and black holes and everything else that’s out there. The amount of information and data is really quite mind-boggling. This article definitely will not contain every fact about astronomy, but they are very interesting facts nevertheless.

Let’s take a look at a small subset of astronomy: “the brightest stars as seen from Earth”. That’s discounting the Sun which is about 250,000 times closer than the next nearest star. It’s so bright that when the sky is viewed from the Earth, it washes out all the other stars in the sky during a phenomenon called daylight.

Remember that according to the scale for the magnitudes given, lower numbers are brighter. Our Sun would be about -26.73, while the full moon is -12.6. So, with that in mind, here are the top 5:

#5 is Vega, which is in Lyra, and which means ‘falling eagle’ in Arabic. It’s about 25 light years away from the Earth, with a magnitude of 0.04.

NB: when thinking about this astronomical information, please just bear in mind that the ‘brightest from the Earth’ doesn’t mean ‘largest’ or ‘brightest’. The Sun is not the largest or brightest star in the universe or even the galaxy by any means, but it seems to be so bright to us because we are near to it compared to the other stars.

#4 Rigel Centaurus – a very bright, bluish-white supergiant star in the constellation Orion. It is a binary star, with an average apparent magnitude of 0.12. It’s scientific name is Beta Orionis. ‘Rigel Centaurus’ is Arabic for ‘the foot of the centaur’. It’s about four light years from Earth.

#3 is Arcturus. The translates as ‘guardian of the bear’ from the Greek. This star is about 37 light years away from us. It is situated in the constellation of Bootes, close to The Great Bear. It has a magnitude of 0.00

#2 Canopus. Of these top five, Canopus, the Greek name for the pilot of the vessel Argo made famous in the stories about Jason and the Argonauts, is the brightest. But it’s 313 light years from Earth, so it’s just second on this list as seen from Earth. It has a magnitude of -.62 as seen from this planet.

#1 is Sirius, meaning ’scorching’ in Greek. It’s also called the ‘Dog Star’ because it is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (‘The Big Dog’). It’s only 9 light years from Earth. That’s second closest of these top five. But from Earth it has a magnitude of -1.44. That makes it easily the brightest star as seen in the night sky.

These few data don’t even scratch the surface of subject of astronomy but it’s something for you to think about the next time you gaze up into the night sky.