Space Exploration Center
Our World In Space
Window Of The Sky
Would you like to explore space far above the Earth? You can do this without leaving the ground.
No matter where you live, you can look through a window into space. You can look into the sky and
make discoveries, if you know how to look and what to see.
In daytime, the Sun is in the sky, and sometimes you can see the Moon.
No stars are vssible, because the sky is too bright for them to be seen.
But star are always there.
All day long the sun moves across the sky. That is the way it seems, but of course the Sun does not really move.
Suppose you are on a ship, waiting to sail. Suddenly the land begins to drift away from the ship.
But you know this is impossible! The land is not moving. The ship has begun to move away from the land.
So it is the Sun and the Earth. The Sun is still; the Earth is moving. It is rotating-spinning like a top.
It spins around an imaginary line, the axis, which runs through the Earth from pole to pole.
You do not notice the motion, since everything around you is moving the same way.
The Earth spins toward mthe east. Because of this, the Sun seems to move toward the west. At sunset, your part of the Earth is turning away from the Sun.
For a while the sky stays bright, and its brightness hides the fainter light of the stars. Then the Earth moves you around into its own shadow called night.
The darkening sky becomes a window. You look through it into space, and see what was hidden before. A few bright stars appear; soon there are hundreds, and later a few thousand.
It is easy to picture the sky as a great dome with the star fixed upon it. As you watch, the dome and all the stars seem to be turning.
The motion is from east to west. New stars rise in the east while others set in the west.
Of course,the stars only seem to move because the Earth is turning under them.
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