Space: the final frontier - Some thoughts from a lay point of view

  I was always been a science nerd, however life brought me into a specific area to study molecular biology and human health. The title of the post can lead you to an 'easter egg' for those who watched some Star Trek and of course, sci-fi is one of my preferences for watching a movie or tv show.

  I remember when I was a child that I used to observer a lot the sky during the night, with not many tools available, and my dad pointed to a bright white light and saying: " This is Venus or morning star". After that I started to always look to the sky to find the "morning star".

  I grew and had children, my 5 years old daughter started to observe more the sky and started to make questions about stars, moon and the sun. That made me comeback to study a bit about space, which as I said, in the beginning, I left a little bit behind to give priority to science knowledge associated more directly with my work. At first, my parents bought a book about the Solar System for her, so we started to read together about the planets, and I noticed that something had changed a bit from my school ages, Pluto wasn't a planet anymore and also some other dwarf planets were included as well in the knowledge. Like Pluto, we have Ceres, Makemake, Haumea and Eris. Of course, I am not so alienated to not noticed the news about Pluto leaving the status of a Planet a while ago, it is just that the info entered through my ears and I didn't had time to think a lot about it. But now I started to study again to help my daughter to understand the space's mysteries.

  Another thing that we started to do is to be aware about the news and important phenomena that we can visualize from here. Than I noticed that what my dad pointed to be Venus, sometimes probably it was another planet, since I learned that Venus can be only visualized during dusk or dawn since it has a pretty close orbit from the Sun, so the big star needs to be close for sure. A couple of weeks ago during a couple of days, we could see Venus and Jupiter not very far from each other during dusk. It was an amazing experience, we still had the light from the Sun and the first two bright points in the sky were the planets since the other stars took a while to show off. In the picture below you can see the picture published at CNN with also the moon in there

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/world/venus-jupiter-conjunction-how-to-see-scn/index.html

  Another nice observation which I think was at the end of last year, happened with Mars. The big red planet could be visualized in a spot very close to the moon, so every time that we looked at the moon we saw that bright light with red aspects. These events are great for us to have some chats about planets with our little ones, to try to see if they can abstract and imagine that one small point in the sky is actually too many times bigger than us, maybe not a good place to visit, since most of these planets are difficult to be inhabited by us. But still, a far place that for now only machines could go in some of them. However, we still have our moon right beside us which brings us many good details to be visualized without any big fancy telescopes. Do you look up at the sky sometimes?

https://pixabay.com/photos/moon-full-moon-sky-night-sky-lunar-1859616/