Celestial Sphere
A picture made of stars in the night sky
What is a Constellation?
Big and Little Dipper
Orion
This phase of the moon is shown when we see the entire daylight side of the moon at night.
What is a full moon?
New moon is seeing the full shadow.
The earth is in the center of this ancient model of the solar system.
What is Geocentric model?
Heliocentric is sun centered.
This is the time it takes earth to compete one rotation around the sun.
What is one year or 365 days?
This is the name of our galaxy.
What is the Milky Way?
This is the angular distance above the horizon.
What is the altitude?
Azimuth is a horizontal angle, measured in degrees clockwise from a reference direction (usually North).
This phase of the moon is the first sliver of the moon we see after a new moon.
What is a Waxing Crescent?
Waxing=bigger
Waning=smaller
This is the shape of our planets' orbits.
What is an Ellipse?
Kepler's 1st law
This is the shortest day (amount of sunlight) of the year.
What is the Winter Solstice?
Summer solstice is the longest amount of sunlight.
This looks at your Zodiac sign to guess how your life will go and includes your horoscope.
What is astrology?
This is directly overhead in the night sky.
What is the zenith?
This phenomena happens when the moon passes into the earth's shadow.
What is a lunar eclipse?
Solar eclipse is moon casting its shadow onto earth, blocking the sun.
He was the first modern astronomer to propose the Heliocentric model of the solar system.
Who is Nicolaus Copernicus?
This is why earth has seasons.
What is the tilt of earth's axis?
23.5 degrees
This is the average distance from the sun to the earth.
What is an Astronomical Unit?
Equal to about 93 million miles.
This star is at our celestial North Pole.
What is Polaris or the North Star?
Theses are the changes about the earth and moon to give us the phases of the moon. It also the only part of the moon we ever see.
What is the perspective or what portion of the moon we see?
Half the moon is always lit up, we only see a certain half of the moon from earth.
This is the backwards motion of planets that was not supported by the geocentric model.
What is retrograde motion?
This is the time it takes the earth to make one exact 360 degree rotation.
What is the Sidereal day?
Solar day is noon to noon.
Our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centura, is this far away.
What is about 4 (4.24) lightyears away?
Light year is how far light travels in one year.
This angular measurement is about equal to the size of your pinky.
What is 1 degree in the night sky?
Around this planet was the first moon, other than our own, to be discovered.
What is Jupiter?
These are the 4 Galilean moons that Galileo saw.
This is the farthest and slowest point in earth's orbit around the sun.
What is the Aphelion?
Perihelion is the closest and fastest.
From Kepler's 2nd Law
Over the next 13,000 years, our axis will tilt thanks to this phenomena.
What is Procession?
We use this phenomenon to measure the distance to nearby stars.
What is Parallax?
This technique involves observing the apparent shift in a nearby star's position relative to distant background stars when viewed from opposite sides of Earth’s orbit around the Sun (6 months apart).