If you have had that kind of moment when you were literally struck breathless by the spender the night sky can show to us, you can probably remember that exact moment when you could say little else but wow at what you saw. That Wow moment is what astrology is all about. For some, that wow moment becomes a passion that leads to a career studying the stars. But did you know that astronomy is one of the oldest and most respected sciences of them all? As far back as before the times of Christ, the wise and thinking people of societies of the time were looking at the stars and finding ways to track and chart them. We who love the hobby of astronomy can chart a proud history of astronomers that tracks across millennia and through virtually every culture in civilization. The three designs of telescopes that most people use are the Refractor, the Reflector and the Schmidt Cassegrain telescope. - The refractor telescope uses a convex lens to focus the light on the eyepiece. - The reflector telescope has a concave lens which means it bends in. It uses mirrors to focus the image that you eventually see. A large amount of dust, ice and other space debris gets caught up in a comet s tail as it moves toward the sun. Then as the comet moves away from the sun in its orbit, tons of this matter is thrown off into space to disperse. As the Earth moves in its routine orbit around the sun, it often crosses through clouds of this discarded matter which becomes one of those meteor showers that are so popular for viewing. - 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. Unlike suns, planets and moons, asteroids are on the move, ever changing and, if they appear in the night sky, exciting and dynamic. Like rock stars, asteroids have been given their fair share of urban myth and lore. Many have attributed the extinction of the dinosaurs to the impact of a huge asteroid on the earth.