We do not know precisely why they did it, but we can deduce that early man noticed a correlation between the weather and the stars, which were themselves not fully understood, of course.

Early man, probably even as far back as Neanderthal man, noticed the relationship between the weather and herd movements and crop growth, or at least fruit and nuts on local trees, if they did not have planted crops.

This means that people could see a connection between the stars and food availability. This relationship was probably ritualized into some sort of religion like early Wicca. Therefore, the stars became a very important part of the lives of every single person and it is likely that astrology and astronomy were widely intermixed by the average person.

However, there were also people who did not only use the stars as some vast celestial clock and who tried to make sense of the whole shebang. I am going to narrate below, eight of the most significant dates or years in the history of astronomy before Christ walked on the Earth. In no way forget that they had nothing but an abacus to do there calculations and no telescopes, which came about two thousand years later.

585 BC: Thales of Miletus (c. 625- c. 547), a Greek, predicted a solar eclipse in Asia Minor purely on the basis of his observations and calculations. It was not a lucky guess!

c. 400 BC: the astronomer Oenopedes (5th. century). also a Greek, announces that the Earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the Sun.

352 BC: the Chinese report what they called a ‘guest star’, a supernova, which was the earliest reported sighting.

340 BC: The astronomer, Kidinnu (b. Babylon c. 379 BC) discovers the precession of the Equinoxes, ie the apparent change in the position of the stars caused by the Earth’s wobbling on its axis.

c. 300 BC: a ‘committee’ of Chinese astronomers compile star maps of the visible universe.

c. 240 BC: Chinese astronomers observe and make notes about Halley’s Comet. Also Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 – c.194 BC), a Greek, correctly calculate the Earth’s dimensions.

165 BC: Chinese astronomers notice sunspots for the first time.

c. 130 BC: the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (b. 147 BC), a Greek, correctly calculates the distance to the Earth’s Moon and also rediscovers the precession of the Equinoxes.

You will see from the dates above that clearly not everyone let nature and the stars govern their lives, as the common farmer or hunter did. Some men actually put pen to paper, but before pen and paper even existed, and tried to work out ‘why these manifestations took place?’.

These people must have been remarkable men to have worked these measurements out by calculation, observation by the naked eye and rationalization alone.

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However, this does not only apply to China, it also occurs in most other Eastern countries, like Thailand, and most Arabic countries.

A lunar month is determined by measuring the period of time needed for the moon to complete its full cycle of 29 and a half days, a standard that makes the lunar year a full eleven days shorter than its solar counterpart. This difference is corrected every 19 years by the addition of seven lunar months.

The 12 lunar months are further divided into 24 solar divisions characterized by the four seasons and times of heat and cold, all of which bear a close relationship to the yearly cycle of agricultural work.

The Chinese calendar – very much like the Hebrew calendar- is a combination of the solar and lunar calendars in that it strives to have its years concur with the tropical year and its months coincide with the synodic months. It is not surprising that a few similarities exist between the Chinese and the Hebrew calendar.

For example, an average year has 12 months, a leap year has 13 months. An ordinary year has 353, 354, or 355 days, a leap year has 383, 384, or 385 days. When determining what a Chinese year will be like, one needs to make a number of astronomical calculations.

First of all, you have to determine the dates for the new moons. In these cases, a new Moon is the completely black Moon (that is to say, when the Moon is in conjunction with the Sun), not the first visible crescent, as is used by the Islamic and Hebrew calendars. The date of a new moon is then the first day of a new month.

The reason why the majority of countries which had their own calendars had to dump them in favour of the Western, Julian calendar that we use today, is business. First the British and then the Americans ran international business and they used the Julian calendar.Anyone who wanted to work with them had to follow suit. This is why national policy often varies from local custom in Third World countries.

The government desires to deal on the International markets, but the ordinary family in the country can not. So, the government adopted the Julian calendar but the people only pay lip service to it. I live in Thailand and people here do not even use the 24 hour day divided into two halves. Their day has four sections of six hours each and the first part starts at 6AM, not midnight. Therefore, they have four 4 o’clocks a day, for example but no 7 o’clocks. They are also 543 years ahead of us, although this is more common, for example in Muslim countries.

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They understood then, thousands of years ago, that the majority of stars appear to rise in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ’stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they went ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were not the same as those visible in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 – 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the celestial bodies than the average common man of today does. (I mean men and women here, of course).

They learned how to calculate or at least locate the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, probably to facilitate the location of certain positions of the sun or other planets or stars, which may have been important to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for studying the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to observe things millions of miles away that no one had ever seen before. Because of the deductions he drew from his observations, he clashed with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so radical were his discoveries.

But humankind was not to be intimidated, and since then we have gone on to build ever bigger and ever better astronomical telescopes through which we can even detect radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, infrared waves and gamma waves from outer space. Forty years ago, we even travelled to our Moon. and we have sent rockets to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to quite a few comets and asteroids.

Where are we going next? That decision was always up to the government of the United States and the old Soviet Union, but now there are other players in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be just a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of change and power may be shifting from its traditional seats, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times in the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy exciting.

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Astronomy is a very serious branch of science, although many people get involved with it when they are very young. Astronomy is a thought-provoking hobby that can teach children about the other sciences in general. Some astronomical subjects inspire kids and movies like Star Wars and they serve to increase this attraction.

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 near, 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 seas’ 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 from 91 to 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 delivers both light and heat to the planets. A little known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass in the solar system. That is massive!

The Earth is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies, it’s a very large collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, only empty space. In other words, most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the size of our galaxy, is nothingness.

Our Earth is located somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The emptiness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named after the thick group of stars in the main section of it.

It looks like a pool of liquid, which is why it was called the Milky Way. There are four sorts of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

There is a great deal of information on astronomy on the Internet that is fit for children: from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show the orbits of the different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In deed, there’s more information than a child could ever get through.

For many people astronomy is an interesting science stuffed with many astronomy fun facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the makeup of distant planets has been recorded. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten people.

The Sun is a great font for astronomy fun facts. Our own star, which supplies us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows the precise distance, but rather because the Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse, an uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

The Sun is only an average size star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As average as it is, it accounts for about 98% of all the material in our solar system. Even with the massive planet of Jupiter on our side, we’re still only a small 2% of non Sun stuff.

It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to stretch across this average Sun. The solar winds created by the Sun reaches out about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or put another way, those solar winds go out about 50 AU’s. An AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth, which is quite an fantastic fact, isn’t it?.

How about astronomy fun facts that don’t have much to do with the Sun then? How about our Moon? It’s the only non-Earth object that man has walked on until now. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker really liked the Moon but was rejected as an astronaut. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are many more astronomy fun facts about the Moon. It’s the site of what might become the oldest footprint known to man. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind left a footprint or shoe print in the Moon’s dust that will probably still be visible in 10 million years time.

Lots of people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still believed the Moon to be made of cheese. And finally, the suits worn by the Moon-walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the Moon, because of the Moon’s reduced gravity. Talk about losing weight, eh?

Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close astronomical neighbours. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that their light takes a million years to reach us. Some of the stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite staggering.

There are millions of astronomy fun facts and we could go on about them forever. But unfortunately, this article can not. So, please, just get out there and learn more about astronomy for yourself.