Become An Amateur Astronomer By Learning About Star Astronomy

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Become An Amateur Astronomer By Learning About Star Astronomy

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Astronomy, like the universe, is a vast subject. Even a subset star astronomy is huge. It would take a lifetime just to learn about all the objects that orbit our own small sun. That’s why many people decide to focus their attention on the stars. This is a perfect opportunity to look at telescopes for beginners and make this an initial move in helping your children appreciate astronomy.

Which Is The Largest Star?

The closest star we know is our sun, about 94,000,000 miles away from Earth. Consider what the sun feels like on a hot day, imagine how hot it is up close. 98% of the stuff in our solar system is in the sun. That’s compared to all the planets, moons, space rocks and other material. If someone wanted to they could fit 105 Earths across the face of the sun, and over 1.3 million earths inside the Sun. The heat is generated from a nuclear reaction in the sun’s core where the pressure is 340 billion times the pressure on Earth and temperatures reach 27,000,000F. That would burn a pizza in a second.

The sun is the most studied star we know. The next nearest star is 250,000 times further from Earth. Star astronomy gets interesting when you consider all of those stars out there.

From Earth a person with good eyes can see 5000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy. More of the 1×10^22 stars in the universe can be seen even through a child telescope. By the way, that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. In fact, even small telescopes for kids opens the eyes of an amateur star astronomy enthusiast to hundreds of thousands of stars. Wow! Larger telescopes can bring over 200 billion stars into view. It’s a project of generations just to count each one.

The Benefits of Star Astronomy

Star astronomy experts have now proven that many other stars have planets. Planets cause stars to wobble, and that can be measured. In 2008, for the first time, astronomers took visible light photographs of planets orbiting distant suns. We are ever closer to finding intelligent life.

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