I left school about 20 years ago but I’m back doing my GCSE’s again. I was in the first year to do the new GCSE; I remember lots of people saying it would not last, but looks like it has…
Anyway, about a year ago I decided to do a simple course in Astronomy to get a basic grounding and possibly wet my appetite for further study at much higher levels. I have a B.Eng in Electronic Systems & Information Engineering, the motivation of which was to get a job as opposed to further my understanding of something I was interested in; I’d love to do the same but for something I could put my heart into i.e. Astronomy.
I started the GCSE course with The Planet Earth Centre last year and due to having to gain some critical career based qualifications I’ve only managed to complete one assignment 
all though I did get 97% 
The good thing about this course is they let you study at your own pace.
I now have more time to spend on my Astro study; if you are studying the same course why not leave a comment.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
![[Post to Twitter]](http://whyastronomy.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
Tweet This
I realise I’ve recently taken for granted how long a Light Year is; flippantly using it as a unit of measure. I just happened to be reading about the Ring Nebula sitting 4,000 Light Years away from Earth. The first thing that crossed my mind was the 4,000 part, which on it’s own sounds big, but when you consider you’re talking in Light Years then that puts things in a different perspective.
Light Years, the distance light can travel in an Earth year; when you sit and think about it, that’s massive!
Light travels at roughly 300,000 Km in a second. The average circumference of Earth is about 40,000Km. So, in one second, light can travel 7.5 times round Earth; for those reading this from the UK it could do John o’Groats to Land’s End (as the crow flies) in about 0.03 seconds. Now scale that thinking from seconds into years. There are about 31.5 Million seconds in a year = 236 Million times round Earth. Now multiply that by 4000 to get you to the Ring Nebula; mind blowing!
I know we have to quantify such vast distances in a way we can easily handle them, but every so often just stop and think about how big a Light Year is.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
Tweet This
I’ve not used stumble in a while but a couple of days ago I hit the Stumble! button in my browser and came across this.
This is a great way to give a sense of perspective to people very new to astronomy.
Tweet This
Came across a P/ prefix in a comet’s name and didn’t know what it was so I did a google search and found the following Wikipedia page; essentially a prefix is added to indicate the nature of the comet:
P/ = Periodic comet i.e. it’s orbit passes earth periodically
C/ = Non-periodic comet
X/ = No reliable orbit could be calculated
Am I missing something in the answer to this ’What’ then please leave your suggestion as a comment.
Until the next post… Clear Skies!
Tweet This
