No matter how far along you are in your sophistication as an amateur astronomer, there is always one pivotal moment that we all come back to. That's the very first moment we went outside where you got a good view of space and captured the night sky. For city dwellers, the revelation is as profound as discovering aliens living among us. Most of us have no idea of the vast panorama of lights that adorn the clear night sky when there are no city lights in sight.
Indeed we all love the enhanced experience of studying the sky with binoculars and telescopes of various sizes and powers. But I bet you remember as a child the very first time you saw the clear night sky in full view with all those amazing constellations, meteors, and comets moving and exposure of points of light so numerous you could even count.
The best way to recapture the wonder of that moment is to go out into the countryside with your child or a child who has never had the experience and be there when they look up and say that very powerful word that is the only one that can sum up the feeling, which they experience when looking at that beautiful sky. That word is – “Wow”.
Probably the most phenomenal fact about what a child is looking at is also the thing that is most difficult for them to grasp, the sheer enormity of what is above them and what it represents. The very fact that almost certainly, virtually every dot up there in the sky is another star or celestial body that is much larger than the Earth itself, not twice or ten times, but by a factor of hundreds and thousands, can be an exciting idea. children. Children have enough trouble imagining the size of the Earth itself, let alone something as vast as the universe.
But when it comes to astronomy, we do better by falling into deeper and deeper levels of awe at what we see in the night sky. Some amazing facts about what children are looking at can add to the goosebumps they already have when they look up at the sky. Facts like…
* Our Sun is part of a huge galaxy called the Milky Way, which consists of a hundred billion stars similar or larger. Show them that a hundred billion is 100,000,000,000 and your jaw will surely drop.
* The Milky Way is just one of tens of billions of galaxies, each of which also contains billions of stars. The Milky Way is one of the small galaxies.
* If you wanted to travel the Milky Way, it would take you 100,000 years. But you can't get there by driving the speed limit. You have to drive five trillion, eight hundred million miles a year to get all the way that fast.
* Scientists have calculated that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old.
These little fun facts should lead to a pretty spirited discussion about the origins of the universe and the possibility of space travel or the existence of life on other planets. You can challenge the children to calculate that if each star in the Milky Way supported nine planets, and if only one of them were as habitable as Earth, what is the probability that life would exist on one of them? I think you'll see some real excitement when they try to run these numbers.
Such a discussion can be fun, exciting, and full of questions. Don't be too hasty and stop their imagination, because that is the birth of a lifelong love of astronomy that they experience. And if you were there the first time they saw the night sky, you'll relive your own great moment as a child. And it just might reignite a whole new excitement about astronomy in you.
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