What You See In The Sky

What You See In The Sky

What You Can See In The Sky

 You look up at the sky and see the noticeable, stars, the moon, but what else is really up there that you can see? Almost every little dot in the sky is a star. How many stars can you spot in the sky with your bare eye? In cities you tend to see around 1, 000 to 1, 500 stars and in the country end you can see around 3, 000 stars. It is impossible to keep track of how many stars are in the sky and count every one. The only way to keep track of which stars are which is to put them into constellations which is considered a group of stars. Constellations usually have named base on mythology characters, especially from the Greek and Babylonian mythology stories. It is a lot easier to know which stars are which by grouping them together, therefore constellations were formed.

 Stars can also form clusters, for example, Pleiades is a cluster. As well, a lot of stars are "binary" stars which is a stellar system that consists of a pair of stars orbiting around the center of mass. Every star has its match. Some are variable stars that have alternating brightness. The cycle that occurs for stars which alternate is a process which can take days or years but may be as short as only a few hours. Some stars actually change brightness which occurs in a long period of time. These stars are called kefeids.

 Every star that you can see in the sky belongs to the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a very big group of stars which consists of billions of stars. All around the Milky Way are ball shaped star clusters. Between stars is not actually an empty space but rather matter which is not visible. For example, the M42 Nebula in the Orion constellation. New stars are created in this specific type of nebulae.

 Galaxies like the M31 Andromeda galaxy are very large groups of stars. Still, these big groups of stars are still small in the big picture as groups of galaxies are way larger. Besides stars in the sky, there are also planets, meteors, comets and the moon, as well as the satellites which continue to orbit around Earth.

 So next time you look up in the sky, don't think you are just staring at stars, there is a lot more then that up in the sky.

Copyright 2007 @ Zyas.com