Astronomical Society of Coonabarabran

Random Facts About Astronomy

by Alyssa Verrender [additional facts in square brackets and marked 'KC' or 'PC' are by Kevin Cooper or Paul Cass respectively]

Neil Armstrong had a size 13 shoe when he walked on the moon.
More than 450 astronauts have travelled into space.
Before Yuri Gagarin entered the Vostok 1 Spacecraft on April 12, 1961 he ate chopped meat, blackberry jam and coffee for breakfast.
There are over 1 billion asteroids in our solar system with the diameter of 100 meters or more.
Subaru is Japanese for Pleiades, take a closer look at the emblem the next time you see a Subaru.
The reason Venus is so bright is because the clouds are so dense that light bounces off them, making Venus appear bright to us on Earth.
Betelgeuse is so large that if it were placed where our Sun is, the surface would be just over half way to Jupiter.
Mu Cephei (also known as the Garnet Star) is so large its surface would be between Jupiter and Saturn.
If a marshmallow were dropped from a foot above the surface of a neutron star it would have the energy of a modern atomic bomb.
Alan Shepard used a 6 iron for his two golf shots on the moon.
The Tarantula Nebula (NGC 2070) is located in the eastern portion of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is the only extra-galactic nebula that is visible to the naked-eye. If NGC 2070 were as close as the Orion Nebula (M42), it would take up the entire constellation of Orion and be bright enough to cast a shadow.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum.
The 200-inch (5.08 m) mirror for the telescope on Palomar Mountain weights over 14 tons and is 27-inches (686 mm) thick. The telescope gathers 640,000 times as much light as the human eye.
[150 inch (3.81 m) AAT mirror weighs 16 tons and is approximately 630 mm thick - KC]
If there were a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float in the water.
The United States has many firsts, one of which was the 1^st nation to put a man on the moon.
The USSR had the following:
1st orbital spacecraft, Sputnik
1st spacecraft to carry an animal (a dog Laika), Sputnik 2
1st spacecraft to reach another celestial body, Luna 2
1st spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, Luna 3
1st spacecraft to land safely on another planet, Venera 7
1st manned spacecraft, Vostok 1, which carried the ...
1st human into space (Yuri Gagarin)
The space shuttle lands at a slope 6-7 times steeper than commercial airplanes!
More than 80% of all stars are members of multiple star systems containing two or more stars.
The asteroid "3554 Amun" will cross the Earth's orbit in 2020. It contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinum-like metals.
Dr. Michael Griffin is the current Administrator of NASA. He has seven degrees including Masters degrees in Aerospace Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Civil Engineering. He also has an MBA and a PhD in Aerospace Engineering!
As a result, his full salutation is Prof. Dr. Michael Griffin BSc, MSc, MEng, MBA, Ph.D!
Pluto is the only planet in the solar system that has never been visited by a spacecraft.
The NASA rovers on Mars have lasted seven times as long as they were intended to.
In 2029, the 1,000-foot (320 meters) asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will whiz by Earth at a distance of about 18,600 miles (30,000 kilometres). That is about as close as many geosynchronous satellites. It will swing by the Earth again in either 2035 or 2036, and scientists predict it has a small chance of hitting the planet on this pass.
The Lunar Module from the Apollo missions required less computer power to land on the moon than today's average cellphone!
The inside of the Earth is spinning faster than the rest of it.
According to a new study, the inner core of Earth spins nine-thousandths of a second faster than outer layers of the Earth, which may be responsible for the Earth's magnetic field.
At a cost of $1.5B and the size of a school bus, the Hubble Space telescope was launched in 1990.
Using its 94.5-inch primary mirror, Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of data every week! This mirror is such a smooth curve that if it was scaled up to the diameter of the Earth, the largest bump would only be 6 inches tall.
The Sun contains more than 99.8% of the mass in the solar system -- Jupiter contains most of the rest.
Every second, the Sun converts about 700 million tons of hydrogen to 695 million tons of helium and 386 billion billion megawatts of energy (see also e=mc² fact). It's been doing this for about 4.5 billion years and will keep going for another 5 billion years before growing to a red giant and gobbling up the Earth.
There will not be a full moon on Halloween until the year 2020.
The rings of Saturn are so thin that if you shrunk them so that they are as thick as a music record, they would still be 8 miles wide.
Lightning is 3 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The surface temperature of the Sun is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5538 ℃), while lightening is 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit (16,649 ℃).
For North America the Earth is actually closer to the Sun in the Winter.
If you were to drive a car at 100 kilometres an hour, 24 hours a day then you could reach the Sun in about 171 years.
[If you flew in a jumbo jet (at normal cruise speed) for 24 hours each day then you could reach the Sun in about 19 years - PC]
If we could travel in a space ship at a speed of 50,000 kilometres per hour, it would take over 90,000 years to reach the star that is the nearest star of all to the Sun, Proxima Centauri.
It takes the light from the Sun over eight (8) minutes to reach the Earth. That means that if the Sun blew up right now, we would have eight more minutes of life before we were affected as well.
To remember the types of star classifications, commit the phrase "Oh, Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me" to memory. The first letter of each word is a star classification: O, B, A, F, G, K, M.
The gasses in a sunspot average 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1649 ℃) cooler than the rest of the Sun.
The density of the Sun is 1.5 times that of water.
The diameter of the Sun is roughly 860,000 miles (1,384,036 kilometres).
The star known as LP 327-186, a so-called white dwarf, is smaller than the state of Texas yet so dense that if a cubic inch of it were brought to earth it would weigh more than 1.5 million tons.
The 11-year sunspot cycle is actually a part of a larger 22-year cycle in which the entire magnetic field of the Sun may reverse itself!
Did you know that Venus is actually the hottest planet, even though the logical answer would be Mercury since it's the closest to the Sun?
This has something to do with the atmosphere around Venus; main factor being that it absorbs all of the heat surrounding it.
In 'A New Hope' Obi-Wan tells Luke he met his father during the clone wars. This is also stated in many other places in the Star Wars Literature. However, in Episode 1, They meet and the clone wars have yet to begin.
The largest moon connected to the Planet Saturn is known as Titan.
If the Sun were the size of the dot over a letter "i", the nearest star would be a dot 10 miles away.
Some stars are 600,000 times as bright as the Sun.
The evening star is actually a planet, usually Mercury or Venus, when seen in the western sky just after sunset.
Mercury orbits the Sun faster than any other planet, completing one revolution in 88 days.
[Mercury's day is approximately 58 days which is about 2/3 of it's orbital period - KC]
The moon is approximately 234,000 miles (377,586 km) from Earth.
There is enough rail road track on the Earth to go to the moon and back several times.
The Martian "day" is only slightly longer than a day on Earth. On Mars, a day is 24 hours, 37 minutes, 23 seconds long whereas on Earth, a day is 23 hours 56 minutes, 04 seconds long.
If you could fly across our Galaxy from one side to the other at light speed, it would take 100,000 years to make the trip.
Astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs make actual and important contributions to the science.
There are more stars in space than there are specks of sand on the Earth.
The Sun is middle-aged; it's halfway through its 10-billion-year lifetime.