SHOOTING STARS
The UK-China Leonid Meteor Shower
Observation Project

Continued...

"Then there are the stars. These do not change like the Moon does, and seem to stay in the same place. But if you look up every hour or so during the night, you will see that they do move very slowly. If you watch them all night, you will see that they all move around one star in the sky, called the POLE STAR. This is a very important star, because it is more or less above the Earth's North Pole, so we can use it to find South, East and West.

If you carry on looking, you will begin to see that the stars seem to arrange themselves in different patterns that don't change from night to night, or from year to year. These are called CONSTELLATIONS [groups of stars], and for thousands of years people have given them names of famous heroes, monsters and animals. Different countries have given them different names, but not all people see the same patterns.

Look closely at the stars. Stars are like people, they are all different. If you look at them on a clear night, when the Moon isn't in the sky, you will see that they are different colours.They can be white, yellow, red, and sometimes blue. This shows how hot they are. Our Sun is a star like all the others, it is just closer to us so it looks brighter and bigger. It is a yellow star. Stars which are cooler than our Sun can be orange or red. Stars which are hotter can be white or even blue. Some are smaller than our Sun, and others are hundreds of times bigger. But to us, they all appear to be little points of light because they are so far away."

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