Star gazing is a fun activity that you can add to your creative family beach vacations.

Star gazing, or sky watching, is as old as man himself, and is a wonderful activity to add to your creative family beach vacations. Here's a bit of history for you...

Introduction
When you look up at a clear night sky, star gazing, you can see about 2000 stars with the naked eye. In the 2nd century B.C., an ancient Greek astronomer called Hipparchus gazed up and saw these same stars, and was one of the first people to develop a chart of these same stars. He discovered that if you look at these stars on the first day of spring each year, they will have moved slightly from the previous year...a major discovery in the field of astronomy.

Tycho Brahe
A 16th Century Danish nobleman called Tycho Brahe, build upon the work of Hipparchus. He used a device called a sextant, which sailors had used for years to navigate the seas, to study the motions of the planets. It took him years to record his findings, but this compiled work was the most precise to date.

Johannes Kepler
When Tycho passed away, his assistant, Johannes Kepler, continued with his work. Building upon the findings of Tycho, he surmised that the planets travel around the sun in an elliptical fashion. This was contrary to the popular belief that the earth was the center of the universe.

Nebulae
For centuries after Kepler's work, most people believed that the universe consisted of only the stars in our galaxy, plus a few distant objects called "nebulae". The telescopes of the time were too basic to resolve the contents of these objects. It was not til years later that they were able to ascertain that these "nebulae" were in fact independent galaxies.

Mount Wilson
In 1917 a powerful telescope was built on Mount Wilson, in California. It was the largest telescope of the time, and unveiled secrets of the universe that were earth-shattering at the time. For example, it was discovered that "nebulae" were in fact galaxies, like our own Milky Way. Furthermore, there were hundreds of billions of these galaxies.

Edwin Hubble
In 1924, Edwin Hubble was observing a series of distant galaxies, and discovered that the light from these galaxies was reshifted, meaning stretched. In addition, the farther away the galaxy was, the greater the reshift. This laid the foundation for the belief that the universe was expanding, leading to the "Big Bang" theory. The "Big Bang" theory basically states that the universe started from a singular point billions of years ago, and has been expanding ever since. This idea forms the foundation for all modern astronomy.

Black Holes
In the 20th Century we have learned that there are "Black Holes" lurking in the centers of some galaxies. Black Holes are extremely dense, and they have the powerful ability to collide galaxies, and explode stars.

Star gazing is a wonderful, fun activity, and hopefully you will be able to find the time to add it to your creative family beach vacations.

Return from "Star Gazing" to the "Romantic" Web Page