I love the night sky. I used to spend hours gazing up at the stars, wondering what all was out there beyond what I could see, what brought it all about and just in awe at the majestic beauty of the night sky. I would stay up all night to see a meteor shower or a planet, and spent a good deal of the daylight hours reading books about astronomy.
Now we have our very own planetarium on our computer, thanks to stellarium. From their website:
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
You can set the coordinates for your town (or somewhere you are visiting), select the time of day you wish to view and even set the speed of the passage of time so you can watch the stars as they rise and set. There are several interesting features which allow you to see the sky as it appears, with lines for the constellations, labels for astronomical features or even with constellation artwork. We have been enjoying just playing around with the features, but I am looking forward to our first formal unit on astronomy even more now.
While you are enjoying the night sky from your desktop, another good site is The Night Sky This Week which, as the name implies, lets you know of all the objects of interest in the night sky for the week.
Related Tags: homeschooling, science, reviews, astronomy, planetarium, stellarium
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Thanks, Dana! Good stuff. We now have the stellarium downloaded and it IS fun. I’m glad to see the names of the constellations and the constellation art showing what they’re ’supposed’ to be. I have already had a very hard time seeing what the ancients saw animal wise, etc. They had a much better imagination than I do.
I’m glad you are enjoying it. We had fun with it today. I agree on the ancients’ “imagination.” How do you get entire figures out of one or two stars?
Imagination?
Debatable.
A more perfect view of the heavens than we; who are much further from perfect creation as they?
Yes.
Are you saying that everything which is in the past is “more perfect” because it is closer to creation? Very debatable. And if they had a more perfect view of the heavens than we, than I suppose that would mean that the stories of Greek heroes told there are not myth but fact and represented by a creator, presumably Zeus.
But other ideas predate their thoughts, and being closer to creation I suppose they must be closer to the truth.
But even Adam and Eve got it wrong, so who is to say?
Too cool. The Bible says that stars were for signs and seasons. Surely we HAVE lost something, somewhere.
christy (http://www.isaiah5413.blogspot.com)
Yes, that’s true, Christy. Like I said, I love the night sky!
And as to the anonymous commenter, are you referring to their interpretation of the stars or to environmental conditions, ie., that more stars may have been visible?
I believe that star charts show roughly the same stars involved that we see today, although some of the constellations changed with the formalization of our current system and the borrowing of constellations from various cultures.
And Greece, Rome and Egypt were pretty heavily polluted. Some suggest moreso than most cities today, due to the number of wood fires being used to heat homes.
Anyway, I enjoyed this history of the constellations.
I’m certain that we have lost a lot, but that does not make any given culture superior in its knowledge simply because it was in the past. The truth has been preserved for us in His word. At least that is my belief : )