Firmament

Stars shine at an affordable part of our firmament, seem endless: apparently, they are measured in hundreds of thousands. But it's an optical illusion. People who are not familiar with science will be surprised to learn that the entire set of stars visible in the northern sky, does not exceed 3,300, only a very advanced and experienced eye sees them more than 5000. But if you resort to using a telescope, this number will take enormous size. Now it's even impossible to determine the total number of stars visible in through a strong instrument, but according to rough calculations, it amounts to several hundreds of millions, as some think, even up to 1200 million. In some places the stars to surprisingly crowded, near the Milky Way, for 41 minutes, the astronomer Herschel observed in the field of view of its huge pipe about a quarter of a million stars. Each of these stars - the sun, like ours, it has its own light, and perhaps, surrounded by their planets. Distances separating these world bodies are so great that we can not draw on them, even an approximate representation. From the nearest fixed star, bright in the constellation Centaurus, the Sun is about eight billion miles, ie, 400,000 times greater than the Earth from the Sun. Light, which takes more than 40000 miles per second, reaches out to us through the years, 6U2; the best of the horses could run the distance of a hundred million years, and not even stopping for a moment. Distance of other stars, even more, and a large part of their so enormous that defies definition. Approximately one can assume that many of them distant from the Sun for hundreds and thousands of stellar distances (the so-called length of eight billion miles): their light is only through the entire Millennium reaches the Earth.