The Sky At Night

I, like I suspect many of you have also, have grown up in a city. This means that there is a considerable amount of light pollution where I live. 

However I'm fortunate enough to be able to live not that far from the countryside where there is a lot less light pollution, which means on a clear night (preferably in the summer when its still warm!) I can do a little stargazing. Last summer whilst on holiday with my family, we lay in the back garden of the cottage we were staying in and watched a meteorshower. It was both very peaceful and very exciting. We got cold quite quickly though because we were being very still in the dark outside, so I'd advise anyone doing it to take something warm to wear, and if you're not using a telescope, to lie on the ground so as not to strain your neck. 

When I was somewhere below the age of 12, my parents for my birthday gave me a book called "Zoo in The Sky" And this is what first got me interested in looking at the stars. The pictures inside were so colourful and the stars on the page were made of something shiny- and I really loved that book! I've still got it! Though I must admit I did for a while have a lingering wariness of looking for the Draco constellation because in the book it said "Be careful! He breathes fire!" and I took this a little more literally than I think the author and illustrator. My favourite part of the book was that the pictures of the animals were studded with these stars in the same arrangement as they would be in the sky. And yet even then, I struggled to find where each constellation should be in the sky because I didn't know how I should orientate the book to line them up with the sky, even though on the inside cover of the book there was a sky chart of the Northern Sky and another of the Southern Sky. So my "favourite constellation" became the one that had the fewest number of stars. Which was the constellation Vulpes- the fox. Because it consisted of only three stars, in a roughly isosceles triangle shape; and it meant I could point at any bit of the sky with three clearly visible stars in it and say excitedly "Look! its the fox constellation!" and genuinely believed that I was an expert stargazer, though in truth I was just an excited child pointing at the sky. However, when looking for the image above, I found that Mitton and Balit also did another book of constellations called "Once Upon A Starry Night" which I may or may not purchase sometime next week. 

I never got the telescope I asked for that following Christmas, but I did get some kick-ass binoculars that for a short time I put to bird-watching use. When I eventually lost interest in our avian friends (not forever though as you'll know if you've read a previous post about birds in the garden at my house!) I did go back to stars again when I started studying them again at school.

It seemed so fascinating to me, that the sun was a star and yet it was big enough and bright enough to light up the whole planet and make daytime and stuff- but that there were so many stars in the sky at night and they didn't even make half as much light as the sun did! And corny though it is, I really quite like the idea that the phrase "we are all made of stardust" is, technically true. And maybe one day, all our atoms will become stars again, after some great solar apocalypse and the whole planet burns up and becomes dust that drifts for billions of lightyears before gravitating towards itself again and building pressure and heat until it becomes another star. I'd like to think that might happen.

What do you think? Do you have a fondness for staring at the stars? Do you live somewhere with a lot of light pollution? Perhaps you get to see lots of shooting stars! Let me know in the comments :)

Today, this is me- getting ready for a glamorous evening of crime fighting:

See you tomorrow, splodgekins!

-Rosa

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