Astronomy can be a life long pursuit and as with many things, even very serious things, people often become interested at an early age. This exciting science can provide hours of study, which is why astronomy is popular with children and their parents. For children, many parts of astronomy are magical and thus a huge draw. Movies like Star Wars only serve to increase this attraction.

The Earth’s nearest celestial body is the moon. Its circumnavigation of the Earth takes twenty seven days and a bit to complete. It is because it is so close, that it is the only space object that a human has ever walked on, other than the Earth of course. The moon is important for the Earth because it causes the tides through gravitational forces between the Earth and the moon. Because it’s close enough to see clearly with the naked eye, kids are often drawn to astronomy by it.

Let’s move on to the sun. Earth is quite far from the sun, although the distance fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles. The reason for this variance is because of Earth’s elliptical orbit. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun, which is our source of important elements such as light and heat. A little-known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass of the whole solar system! Just think about how small a person is compared to that.

We live in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years wide, the size of our galaxy, is empty. We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it. It looks like a pool of liquid, thus the name Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.

There is a lot of information about astronomy for kids on the Internet and kids could easily spend hours wrapped in detailed 3D representations of the universe around us.