■Rural School Leaflet. 955 



THE STARS 



There are many inducements' in the country to spend part of the long 

 winter evenings out-of-doors. There are parties to attend and sleigh 

 rides afford special enjoyment; and these social pleasures always mean 

 some distance of walking or driving under the light of the moon or under 

 the more mysterious light of the stars. How much more interesting 

 such rides and walks may be made if we know something of these wonder- 

 ful stars, each one of them a vast blazing sun, like our own; and, so far 

 as we know, many of them suns with little invisible worlds, like our own, 

 spinning around them. 



It is wonderful what we have discovered about the stars with the aid 

 of telescope, spectroscope and mathematical calculations. We know 

 how far away are the nearer stars; — they are so far that the number of 

 miles is too great for us to comprehend. Light travels at the rate of about 

 186,000 miles per second, and we know it takes about eight minutes for 

 light to reach us from the sun ; but it takes over four years for the light 

 of the nearest star to reach us, and it takes at least 42 years, and maybe 

 47 years for light to reach us from the North Star; and there are other 

 stars so far away that it requires hundreds of years for a ray of light 

 to travel from them to our earth. We have also discovered that many 

 of the stars which seem single are really double suns, many of them 

 revolving around each other. With the naked eye we are able to count 

 about 6,000 stars; although we could not see more than 2,000 at any 

 given time; — but the telescope and telescopic photography show us 

 that there are more than 25,000,000 stars visible from our earth. Another 

 interesting fact we have discovered is that our sun and all its planets 

 are moving toward the beautiful star Vega at the rate of 780 miles per 

 hour. 



The ancient peoples were very observant of the heavens at night, 

 and noted that certain stars together formed certain figures, and they 

 gave these figures names, thus forming what we call constellations. 

 A constellation is simply a group of stars which appear to us to be near 

 together, although they may be many millions of miles apart. The 

 ancient Greeks, who saw their Gods and Goddesses in the trees and 

 waters and mountains also saw them in the heavens and placed them 

 over these constellations, which still bear their names. The stories of 

 these Gods and Goddesses which are in the skies are very interesting 

 and may be found very simply written in "The Storyland of the Stars," 

 Pratt. 



