Who's an Astronomer?
Back in those days,when we were all kids, we always had this dream,A dream, an ambitious one, to fly up to the stars, into the deep space, cosmos and explore the worlds unseen.With days flowing down the lane we learnt that there are a lot of underlying facts we did not actually know.Like one needs a space vehicle to go up into space, and what a herculean effort it takes to actually build one.Most of those dreamers end up dreaming something else the every other night these days.
So what it takes to get into the seat of an astronomer?
First of all who's an astronomer?Who can be an astronomer?Everybody who gapes,gazes and then studies the sky beneath the dense atmosphere above us by any means may be called an Astronomer.Every engineer,biologist,physicist,mathematician looking at the cosmos above us,trying to understand whats happening out there may be called an Astronomer.
With the important question for today answered I'd like to present out with a set of interesting facts and basics of astronomy.
There are 88 official constellations as of date .
Only the brightest of the stars are given names.
These names of stars in the constellation are given a greek letter in order of thier brightness.
Once we end up having not any alphabets to use ,we then move on to numbers.
Stars are not all similarly bright as we know it.Using this as a major classifier is what all the stars are graded on.They're categorized into multiple levels from 1-n depending upon how bright they're but not how far they're.Yes,because you only see whats the brightest first.Our friend the Hubble Space Telescope lurking out in the dark has seen a millions of these and has helped us grade to the maximum amount of these possible.The faintest that it was like the MAG 31 level.Back in 2006 Hubble happened to look up to the then best level of faintest star it has seen the MAG 28 level from the NGC 6397 of the ancient globular cluster.The images that Hubble sent us feel like we're looking at some jewellery set.
This is what phys.org said about this discovery back then.
Looking like glittering jewels, the stars in this Hubble Space Telescope image at left are part of the ancient globular star cluster NGC 6397. Scattered among these brilliant stars are extremely faint stars. Hubble´s Advanced Camera for Surveys has taken a census of the cluster stars, uncovering the faintest stars ever seen in a globular cluster. Globular clusters are spherical concentrations of hundreds of thousands of old stars. The Advanced Camera found the faintest red dwarf stars (26th magnitude), which are cooler and much lower in mass than our Sun, and the dimmest white dwarfs (28th magnitude), the burned-out relics of normal stars. The light from the dimmest white dwarfs is equal to the light produced by a birthday candle on the Moon as seen from Earth. The image at lower right shows the faintest red dwarf star (the red dot within the red circle) spied by Hubble. The image at upper right pinpoints one of the dim white dwarfs (the blue dot within the blue circle) seen by Hubble. The white dwarf has been cooling for billions of years. It is so cool that instead of looking red, it has undergone a chemical change in its atmosphere that makes it appear blue. The images were taken with visual and red filters. NGC 6397, one of the closest globular clusters to Earth, is 8,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Ara. The data for these images were obtained in March and April 2005. Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)
At the current stake there a lot terms you might not understand .We shall learn them as these posts go on.
Coming back to the grading of these stars Hipparchus was the first one to do so.He made a catalog of stars under levels 1-6.
There's a saying " The World would look better to us if we looked up to the sky every night and realize that we're so small."On a personal note I'd like to share something, every time I look up to the sky I always wonder, are we the only intelligent species that this humongous
universe could allow sustain life for such a long period of time.This might have also been your question quite since a long time.We better understand the laws that govern the universe,the way it works and then we might probably get a solution not just to this question but many,many things.
Astronomy is all about observing,recording analyzing and repeating what all you just read,because you know we're always expanding.How did we get to this conclusion by the way?It was Johannes Kepler who first made some statements about this and made the world know of this.There are many such people who pioneered the Astronomy and the science related to it.We shall know of them in detail,both the people and the science they put forward.