Categories: astronomy-space
Date: 09 August 2006 09:42:53
A brilliant and bright full moon tonight. I stepped out of my car when I got home, turned towards the house, and was struck by the light from it: truly magnificent. Living outside a big city has definite advantages. Although, due to the presence of a very strong, and chilly, wind, I didn't stay outside too long.
I've always had a fascination for the night sky, and the universe in general. The numbers in astronomy are mind-boggling: our sun is estimated to be 5 billion (the American billion seems to have overtaken the British one as the standard in use: 9 zeroes) years old, with another 5 billion to go before it runs out of fuel; our nearest star (excluding our sun), Alpha Centauri, is around 4.4 light-years away; and the universe itself is thought to be around 13.7 billion years old. Mind-boggling.
What we can see from here, and what is near to us, has always fascinated me also. One of my favourite sites, for a very long time, perhaps since I first discovered the Internet during my first year of uni (1995), has been The Nine Planets. I love the images of the sun, the moon, the planets, Jupiter and Saturn particularly, and our home, the earth. And pleny of fascinating information also. I also like browsing NASA's photo gallery, and seeing deep-space objects such as the well-known Horsehead Nebula. I have a number of books, pictorial and informative, and some both, on the universe. I love to flick through them. God's creation is indeed a marvellous thing.
Back in 1997, when I first had some 'real' money [it paid more than my job at the pie-factory!] from a job during my internship, I bought a telescope: not terribly expensive, but I thought a reasonable amount for someone in their first 'real' job at the time. I still use it today, though not as often as I once did. I can still recall my amazement at seeing the moon close-up for the first time. Yes, I had seen pictures before: but seeing it myself, through my telescope, which I set up and directed, was something special. And getting glimpses of planets through it, after all the fiddling, and there was plenty of fiddling, was a real joy. I really need to get it out again soon.