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Despite the fact that astronomy is the oldest science, it is still at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but also that of the public at large. Who hasn’t looked up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered? Having said that though, the ancient people of definitely the northern hemisphere, but probably both hemispheres, knew the movements of the stars and planets better than most of us do today.

They knew even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars seem to rise in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ’stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they went ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were different from those visible in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 - 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the celestial bodies than the average common man of today does. (I mean men and women here, of course).

They learned how to calculate or at least locate the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, probably to facilitate the location of certain positions of the sun or other planets or stars, which may have been important to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for looking at the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to see things millions of miles away that no person had ever seen before. Because of the deductions he drew from his observations, he clashed with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so radical were his discoveries.

But mankind was not to be put off, and since then we have gone on to build ever bigger and ever better astronomical telescopes through which we can even detect radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, infrared waves and gamma waves from outer space. Forty years ago, we even travelled to our Moon. and we have sent rockets to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to several comets and asteroids.

Where are we going next? That decision was always up to the government of the United States and the old Soviet Union, but now there are other players in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be just a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of flux and power may be shifting from its traditional seats in the West, but it has not lessened interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times for the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy enthralling .

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There is no uncertainty that astronomy is the oldest science and there is also no hesitation that astronomy was being studied by everyone, not only the wise men, thousands and thousands of years ago.

We do not understand exactly why they did it, but we can surmise that early man noticed a correlation between the weather and the stars, which were themselves not fully understood, of course.

Early man, probably even as far back as Neanderthal man, noticed the relationship between the weather and herd movements and crop growth, or at least fruit and nuts on local trees, if they did not have planted crops.

This means that people could see a connection between the stars and food availability. This relationship was probably ritualized into some sort of religion like early Wicca. Therefore, the stars became a very important part of the lives of every single person and it is likely that astrology and astronomy were widely intermixed by the average person.

However, there were also people who did not only use the stars as some enormous celestial clock and who tried to make sense of the whole shebang. I am going to narrate below, eight of the most important dates or years in the history of astronomy before Christ walked on the Earth. Never forget that they had nothing but an abacus to do there calculations and no telescopes, which came about two thousand years later.

585 BC: Thales of Miletus (c. 625- c. 547), a Greek, predicted a solar eclipse in Asia Minor purely on the basis of his observations and calculations. It was not a lucky guess!

c. 400 BC: the astronomer Oenopedes (5th. century). also a Greek, announces that the Earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the Sun.

352 BC: the Chinese report what they called a ‘guest star’, a supernova, which was the earliest reported sighting.

340 BC: The astronomer, Kidinnu (b. Babylon c. 379 BC) discovers the precession of the Equinoxes, ie the apparent change in the position of the stars caused by the Earth’s wobbling on its axis.

c. 300 BC: a ‘committee’ of Chinese astronomers compile star maps of the visible universe.

c. 240 BC: Chinese astronomers observe and make notes about Halley’s Comet. Also Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 - c.194 BC), a Greek, correctly calculate the Earth’s dimensions.

165 BC: Chinese astronomers notice sunspots for the first time.

c. 130 BC: the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (b. 147 BC), a Greek, correctly calculates the distance to the Earth’s Moon and also rediscovers the precession of the Equinoxes.

You will see from the dates above that obviously not everyone let nature and the stars govern their lives, as the common farmer or hunter did. Some men actually took pen to paper, but before pen and paper even existed, and tried to work out ‘why these manifestations occurred?’.

These individuals must have been remarkable men to have worked these measurements out by calculation, observation by the naked eye and rationalization alone.

Fascinated by astronomy? Then why not pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com

Astronomy is a very serious branch of science, although many people get involved with it when they are quite young. Astronomy is inspiring hobby that can show children about the other sciences in general. Certain astronomical subjects interest kids and movies like Star Wars and they only increase this interest.

The Earth’s nearest neighbour is the moon. Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty-seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth is responsible for the tides. Its brightness in the night sky attracts many children to want to study 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, only 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 situated somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The emptiness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main section of it.

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

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