As you know we (ants) are interested in cosmology in general and outer space in particular. On August 3rd myself and 1,006 others from Pinky's various AntFarms™ visited a science museum & planetarium to learn more about space. We now return with some facts that may interest you, the reader of this blog.

• Galileo first sighted Jupiter's moons on January 7, 1610. At first he thought he was looking at some stars, but after observing their movements for a little while he figured out they were actually moons in orbit around Jupiter. Galileo used a telescope he made himself. We are in the process of making a telescope for ourselves.

• Have you ever wondered how large the moon is, relative to the size of the Earth? Imagine this: if the Earth were the size of an inflatable beach ball, the moon would be roughly the size of a grapefruit. Also, the spherical shape of a grapefruit makes it impossible for us to lift and/or transport.

• The Earth has two moons. Everyone knows the big one, but there is also a much smaller one named Cruithne. It is about 3 miles across and makes a weirdly-shaped orbit around the Earth that takes about 770 years to complete.

• As of this writing there are 240 known moons in our solar system. Maybe more by the time you read this.

• Even though light travels very fast, the universe is so big that the light you see from many of the stars in the sky have taken billions of years to reach your eyeball. So looking up into the night sky is also looking back into the farthest reaches of time - what we are seeing now is how these stars looked billions of years ago.

We hope you enjoy thinking about the above information.

Signing off,
Ant 288b