Astronomy is a serious science and as with many things, even very serious things, people often get in at an early age. This exciting science can provide hours of learning, that’s why astronomy is popular with kids. Kids naturally gravitate to many aspects of astronomy, including the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies.

Our only natural satellite is called the moon. Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty seven days to complete. Man’s knowledge being what it is and because the moon is so close, it is the only space object that mankind has ever set foot on, except for the Earth of course. The effects of gravity between the moon and Earth causes the tides. The moon is one of the first objects that sparks a child’s interest in astronomy because it can be clearly seen with the human eye.

Consider Sol, our own star, the sun. The distance between our home and the sun is very large, although it varies between 91 and 94 million miles. The reason for the variance is the Earth’s elliptical orbit. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun provides both light and heat to the planet. A little known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass in the solar system. What a hog.

We live in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years wide, the size of our galaxy, is empty. We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it. It looks like a pool of liquid, thus the name Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

You can find a wealth of resources concerning astronomy for teens on the world wide web. Kids could spend hours wrapped in detailed 3D representations of the universe around us.