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 AstroCaptain's Universe  |
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Astronomy & Astrophotogryphy Page
This site is based more toward astrophotography than astronomy and to share techniques with other amateur astrophotographers. All of my astrophotography is with the uses of a 35-mm camera & lenses on tripod, piggybacked on a 8 inch Celestron Powerstar 4 or prime focus.
This is how I found out I was interested in Astronomy and hope this web site might make one other person interested too.
One night I was sitting in my chair about half asleep watching TV and my thumb was surfing through the channels when I came across a PBS show called 'JACK HORKEIMER : STAR GAZER' My eyes opened up when he started talking about taking things form the kitchen to put our galaxy into perspective.
" Probably 99.999 etc. percent of all human beings who have ever looked up at the stars and the planets have had no concept whatsoever of either their sizes or their substance. And even though in this age of science and technology we have easy access to this knowledge, nevertheless many people still do not relate to the size of things when it comes to the night sky.
I mean, when you go out and look up at the stars, how often do you think of them as other suns like our own Sun which appear as mere pinpoints of light only because they are so far away? And how often do you think of the different sizes of the planets as we watch them slowly change positions against the stars? Oh yes, we can easily look up the fact that we could fit 1,300 Earths inside the largest planet, Jupiter, or that we could fit 1,300,000 Earths inside our Sun, or that driving a car at 60 miles per hour it would take 177 years to drive from the Earth to the Sun.
But numbers are easily forgotten so if you really want to relate to the cosmos perhaps it's better to think of it in everyday terms, and what could be more everyday than things you find in your kitchen?So the next time you pick up an orange pretend that it is the Sun and on that scale our Earth would be the size of just one grain of table salt circling that orange 30 feet away. The planet Jupiter, however, would be one small cherry pit circling it at a distance of one city block away, and Saturn another cherry pit with a Cheerio around it 2 city blocks away. And Pluto, the smallest and farthest planet from the Sun would be a mere speck of pepper 10 city blocks from the orange. But our Sun, that orange, is just one of billions of stars in a family of stars we call our galaxy. So on this same scale our Sun's closest neighbor would be another orange 1300 miles away. And all the other billions of stars would be fruits of all different sizes and on the average would be 2,000 miles apart. And our entire galaxy would consist of 200 billion oranges, lemons, limes, tomatoes, grapefruits, cantaloupes, pumpkins et cetera occupying a space 20 million miles in diameter. And that's just our galaxy. There are at least 200 billion more. But to show the number of stars in all the galaxies would take more oranges, grapefruits, pumpkins et cetera than have ever grown since the beginning of time. So, the next time you're in your kitchen remember that our Sun is just one of those oranges and its nine planets mere specks of salt, pepper and cherry pits circling it all less than 10 city blocks away. Or, think of it like this: If we could fit our entire solar system, that is our Sun and all its planets, including the distances between them, inside a coffee cup, our Milky Way galaxy would then be the size of North America. Now that's a real wake up cup to think about as you Keep Looking Up! "
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