The Night Sky The first time that you gaze up into the night sky and feel

the wonder of the un iverse is the time when the majority of individuals, even the most respected pro fessional astronomers, think back to when they think of their early interest in the stars. It is normally a very extraordinary moment, when an adult took you by the hand, pointed at the stars and said: 'Look, that is the North Star'. Country folk will probably discover the night sky earlier than city dwellers bec ause the atmosphere above a city is normally so polluted that you cannot see the stars from below. There are two sorts of pollutants that stop you from seeing t he stars in a city, smoke and light. Street lights give off a corona that preven ts you from seeing the weaker light from the stars behind. If you want to bring back that moment in your life, why not take a child out int o the country to look at the stars one night? If you have a pair of binoculars, so much the better, but they are not necessary. If you have forgotten which star s are which, take a book on the subject or a map of the night sky. These days yo u can get a map of the night's sky for the day that you want. The night sky really alters every night. The stars and the constellations do not move much, so you should not have too much difficulty finding them, but if a pl anet is passing by, it will be in a different part of the sky each night, which is why it is useful to get an up-to-date map of the night sky for the date you w ant to go star gazing. One of the hardest concepts for a child (or anyone else for that matter to compr ehend is the scale of the universe - the sheer size of it. Here are a couple of facts that will amaze most people: 1] Our Sun is a star in the galaxy known as the Milky Way and it has its own pla nets revolving around it. However, there are estimated to be 100,000,000,000 (on e hundred billion) stars like our Sun in the Milky Way. 2] The Milky Way is one of approximately tens of billions of galaxies in the uni verse and the Milky Way is one of the smaller galaxies. 3] It would take more than 100,000 years to get from one edge of the Milky Way t o the other, if you were travelling at over five trillion miles per year or more than 570 billion miles per hour. 4] It has been worked out that our Milky Way is 14,000,000,000 (fourteen billion ) years old It is very difficult to comprehend astronomical numbers like this but this may h elp: 1 billion seconds ago, it was 1980 1 billion minutes ago, Jesus had only just died 1 billion hours ago, mankind was not yet on the planet Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with the <a href="http://smarttoysforkids.com/kids-building-set.html" >Kids Building set</a>. If you would like to know more, please visit our websit e at <a href="http://smarttoysforkids.com">Smart Toys for Kids</a>.