I was about 30 years old when I talked to my mother about some program on TV about astronomy when she mentioned that our sun is a star. It’s like all the other stars we see during the night, it’s just closer to us so it appears bigger. My mind was blown. I didn’t understand how I could have lived for 30 years and never thought this thought.
Yesterday me and our 10 years old were talking about the universe and things in it, and I mentioned to her that our sun is just a star like all the other ones we see during the night. I saw that her mind was as blown as mine was back when my mom told me this fact.
Actually even in the song “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” it encourages us to think about this fact, but it took me 30 years to do so.
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My kids and I had a similar though more humorous and less mind blowing experience after reading the “I crave star damage!” comic.
Don’t crave star damage unless you want bits of you carved out or frozen off in the future.
Wear sunscreen.
SunscreenStar damage screen
Totally! My favorite astronomical “wow” with my daughter was when she was 12. She wanted to learn about photography, so I set up a tripod at dusk to teach her about aperture, shutter speed, and motion blur. We also compared shots with a remote shutter so she could see how the slightest camera shake during a long exposure would result in a blurry shot.
We were about to go inside once the stars came out, but instead I thought it would be fun to show her how they looked with a two second exposure. “Wait, why do they look like little commas? Are they moving?” I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her, and then it hit…
😳”No! We’re moving!”🤯
Facts aren’t nearly as interesting without the connection of self-discovery.
She came really close to another mind-blowing fact: if you’re talking about linear motion, there’s no difference at all between “they’re moving” and “we’re moving”. Too bad the apparent motion of the stars is caused by rotation, otherwise it would have been a great lesson to introduce basic relativity concepts.
She understood the curved lines as illustrating the rotation of the Earth. We didn’t get into motion away from the universal center.
She’s much older now. Tyson’s version of Cosmos came out in her teens, so we watched all of those and then went back for the OG Sagan episodes. She’s my favorite nerd.
Yay!
That’s a relatively modern understanding too.
Well, depending. :)
