Look Up in the Sky! When television was young, there was a hugely popular show based on the still popular fictional character of Superman. The opening of that show had a familiar phrase that went, Look. Up in the sky. It s a bird. It s a plane. It s Superman! How beloved Superman has become in our culture and the worldwide fascination with extraterrestrials and all things cosmic only emphasizes that there is a deep curiosity in all humans about nature and astronomy, even if many people would not know to call it astronomy. Most know that Earth is not round but more of an egg shaped orb. To be blunt, the Earth would wobble. Without the moon s stabilizing influence, this shape would shift dramatically so the tilt of the axis, that is the polar caps would shift dramatically with each seasonal rotation producing climacteric, changes much more violent and drastic than we are used to. The range of frequency that light occupies in the big spectrum of frequencies is really pretty small. To put that more bluntly, we can only see a tiny part of the universe that is actually there. Now when you look up in the night sky and it is so overwhelming, when you then that we are seeing just a tiny amount of what is actually going on up there, again, our minds can get pretty overwhelmed. The North Star can then take you to The Little Dipper. The key here is that Polaris is the tip of the handle of The Little Dipper and the bowl hangs down from the handle like it was hanging up in the kitchen. Be patient with this one as the stars that make up The Little Dipper are dimmer than The Big Dipper. But for many of us, it was that first time we saw a rain of fire from the sky that we eventually came to know as a meteoroid shower. At the time when you see the first one, it s easy to remember the movie war of the worlds or some other fantastic image of aliens entering our atmosphere in droves to take over the planet. - The milky was is just one of tens of billions of galaxies each of which has billions of stars in them as well. In fact, the Milky Way is one of the small galaxies. - If you wanted to drive across the Milky Way, it would take you 100,000 years. But you can t get there driving the speed limit. You have to drive five trillion, eight hundred million miles per year to get all the way across that fast.