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Despite the fact that astronomy is the oldest science, it is still at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but also that of the public at large. Who hasn't looked up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered about something larger? Having said that though, the ancient people of definitely the northern hemisphere, but probably both hemispheres, knew the movements of the stars and planets better than the majority of us do nowadays.

They knew even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars appear to appear 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 travelled '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 different from 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 discovered how to work out or at least find the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those points with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the UK, 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 mankind was not intimidated, and since then we have gone on to build ever bigger and ever better telescopes with 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 probes to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to several 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 flux and power may be shifting from its traditional seats in the West, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times for the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy exciting.

Fascinated by astronomy? Then please pop along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com