Waxing and Waning Of the Moon   If we watch the Moon for a month, we would see that it keeps changing it’s  shape, sometimes it is a full circle and then on occasions it is just a semi-circle, The changing of in the Moon’s shape is called waxing and waning, The light, that we get from the Moon at night is not it’s own, it is in  fact, acting only...

The Moon The Moon is our nearest neighbour in space and a natural satellite. It was believed earlier that the Moon was a piece of the Earth which broke away billions of years ago. Today the astronomers believe that both the Earth and Moon were formed from the same cloud of dust close to 5 billion years ago. The Moon is located 3,84,400 kms away from us, it has a diameter...

The Exploration of Mars   Whatever was known about Mars till 1964 was based on the research work carried out by astronomers and scientists. In 1965 the Mariner-IV, an unmanned spacecraft, took the first pictures of Mars. Subsequent to this the Mariner-IX took close-up pictures of this desolate planet in 1971. Based on the data available from the pictures taken by these two space probes, the Viking-I and Viking-II unmanned spacecraft...

Why Are Stars Seen Only At Night? The atmosphere which surrounds the earth gives us the blue sky as we see in the daytime. Stars don’t disappear during daytime, it is just that they cannot be seen because of the Earth’s blue sky and the light from the Sun. If we were to stand on the Moon we would see the stars clearly since lack of air gives the sky a...

The Creation of Stars As we look up in the night sky we see close to 3000 different stars. They seem small but that is because of the distance, in reality they are as big as our Sun, some even bigger. Stars are generally born in clusters and are formed from thin clouds of hydrogen gas. As these clouds shrink, the hydrogen they contain gets compressed which increases the temperature and...

Comets Comets are visible at night and they look very much like meteors and meteorites but in reality they are different. When we see a comet in the sky we notice that it has a bright head and a glowing tail following it as it shoots across the sky. On a closer examination through a telescope we see a bright head, called the ‘coma’ and a large cloud of glowing dust...

Meteors and Meteorites A meteor is what we commonly known as a shooting star. Millions of small pieces of rock, some only as large as a marble, are orbiting the sun. On occasions, one of these pieces enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The friction it experiences while passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, at a speed of over 50 kilometres per second, causes it to burn up leaving a trail of white light...

The Constellations of Stars   Without the help of a telescope we can see about 6000 stars in the sky at night. Half of these can be seen in the northern sky and the other half in the southern sky. As we look at the stars we realise that we can form groups or shapes among them. These groups and shapes were mapped and classified by astronomers and given different names....