Zant

__//**Super moon**//__ - **The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee--a near-perfect coincidence that happens only 18 years or so, adds Chester.**


 * A perigee full Moon brings with it extra-high "perigean tides," but this is nothing to worry about, according to NOAA. In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual. Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (six inches)-not exactly a great flood.**


 * Indeed, contrary to some reports circulating the Internet, perigee Moons do not trigger natural disasters. The "super moon" of March 1983, for instance, passed without incident. And an //almost//-super Moon in Dec. 2008 also proved harmless.--Josie**



__//**Phases Of The Moon**//__- __//**New Moon**//__- **When the Moon is roughly in the same direction as the Sun, its illuminated half is facing away from the Earth, and therefore the part that faces us is all dark: we have the new moon. Moon and the Sun rise and set at about the same time**

__//** Waxing Crescent Moon **//__ - **As the Moon moves around the Earth, we get to see more and more of the illuminated half, and we say the Moon is waxing. At first we get a sliver of it, which grows as days go by. This phase is called the crescent moon. Quarter Moon - A week after the new moon, when the Moon has completed about a quarter of its turn around the Earth, we can see half of the illuminated part; that is, a quarter of the Moon. This is the first quarter phase.** __//** Waxing Gibbous Moon **//__ - **During the next week, we keep seeing more and more of the illuminated part of the Moon, and it is now called waxing gibbous (gibbous means "humped").**
 * __// Full Moon //__** - **Two weeks after the new moon, the moon is now halfway through its revolution, and now the illuminated half coincides with the one facing the Earth, so that we can see a full disk: we have a full moon. As mentioned above, at this time the Moon rises at the time the Sun sets, and it sets when the Sun rises. If the Moon happens to align exactly with the Earth and Sun, then we get a lunar eclipse.**


 * __// Waning Gibbous Moon //__** - **From now on, until it becomes new again, the illuminated part of the Moon that we can see decreases, and we say it's waning. The first week after full, it is called waning gibbous. Last Quarter Moon - Three weeks after new, we again can see half of the illuminated part. This is usually called last quarter.**

__//** Waning Crescent Moon **//__ - **Finally, during the fourth week, the Moon is reduced to a thin sliver from us, sometimes called waning crescent.**
 * A while after four weeks (29.5 days, more precisely) the illuminated half of the Moon again faces away from us, and we come back to the beginning of the cycle: a new moon. Sometimes, when the Moon is almost new, it is possible to dimly see its darkened disk. The light from the Sun cannot reach this part of the Moon directly; but at this time the Earth (as viewed from the Moon) is at its full and very bright, and what we see is light reflected from the Earth, that then bounces back at us from the Moon. It's a long trip for this light: from the Sun to the Earth, to the Moon, and back to the Earth.--Josie.Z**



**__//The sun//__**


 * The sun is a star which is very closer to earth than any other star and appears very large and bright. Without the Sun's light and heat, there would be no life on** Earth**. The Sun is a ball of plasma with a mass of about 2×1030 kg. The sun is mainly composed of hydrogen and helium; it contains about 70% of hydrogen, 28% of helium and less than 2% of other metals. The outer atmosphere of sun has a temperature of over 106 K when its visible surface (the photosphere) has a temperature of just 6,000 K. Solar energy is transformed by plants into chemical energy, which is the first step in the food chain for all living things. The Sun has been around for about 4.6 billion years and is expected to keep burning bright for another 5 billion years.--Josie.Z**
 * [[image:http://www.glogster.com/media/4/19/60/74/19607496.jpg width="302" height="217"]]//__All The Planets__//**

__//**Mercury's**//__ **elliptical orbit takes the small planet as close as 29 million miles (47 million kilometers) and as far as 43 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the sun. If one could stand on the scorching surface of Mercury when it is at its closest point to the sun, the sun would appear almost three times as large as it does when viewed from Earth.**

__//**Venus**//__ **and Earth are similar in size, mass, density, composition, and distance from the sun. There, however, is where the similarities end.**
 * Venus is covered by a thick, rapidly spinning atmosphere, creating a scorched world with temperatures hot enough to melt lead and a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth. Because of its proximity to Earth and the way its clouds reflect sunlight, Venus appears to be the brightest planet in the sky.**

__//**﻿Earth**//__, **our home planet, is the only planet in our solar system known to harbor life. All of the things we need to survive are provided under a thin layer of atmosphere that separates us from the uninhabitable void of space. Earth is made up of complex, interactive systems that are often unpredictable. Air, water, land, and life—including humans—combine forces to create a constantly changing world that we are striving to understand.**

__//**﻿Mars**//__ **is a small rocky body once thought to be very Earthlike. Like the other terrestrial planets—Mercury, Venus, and Earth—its surface has been changed by volcanism, impacts from other bodies, movements of its crust, and atmospheric effects such as dust storms. It has polar ice caps that grow and recede with the change of seasons; areas of layered soils near the Martian poles suggest that the planet's climate has changed more than once, perhaps caused by a regular change in the planet's orbit.** __//**Uranus**//__ **has been revealed as a dynamic world with some of the brightest clouds in the outer solar system and 11 rings. The first planet found with the aid of a telescope, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by astronomer William Herschel. The seventh planet from the sun is so distant that it takes 84 years to complete one orbit.**
 * The most massive planet in our solar system, with four planet-size moons and many smaller satellites, Jupiter forms a kind of miniature solar system. Jupiter resembles a star in composition. In fact, if it had been about eighty times more massive, it would have become a star rather than a planet.**
 * Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to the ancients. In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet. He sketched them as separate spheres and wrote that Saturn appeared to be triple-bodied. In 1659, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, using a more powerful telescope than Galileo's, proposed that Saturn was surrounded by a thin, flat ring.**
 * __//Neptune//__ was the first planet located through mathematical predictions rather than through regular observations of the sky. (Galileo had recorded it as a fixed star during observations with his small telescope in 1612 and 1613.)**

__//**Pluto**//__ **is usually the ninth planet from the Sun although it is sometimes 8th when Pluto moves within Neptune's orbit. Pluto's diameter is 2,300 km and takes 249 years to orbit the Sun. Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930.-- Josie.Z**
 * [[image:http://www.mysundial.ca/tsp/images/3d_horizontal_sundial.jpg width="142" height="184"]]//__Sundial__//**
 * A sundial is an old clock that tells time with a shadow the sun will shine on the sundial to make the shadow and when the earth move the sundial's shadow will move to the next number.--Josie.Z**