Astronomy has been around ever since humankind first looked up at the stars and wondered about the sparkling lights above. There is evidence to suggest that people have been charting the skies for over 15,000 years. Cave paintings in France and Spain include maps of star clusters, such as the Pleiades. The Akkadians, who lived in Babylonia 4500 years ago, kept many astronomical records, including the path of the Sun, the Moon and the planets. Stonehenge, in England, was built in around 3000BC. It is a giant astronomical calendar with stones aligned to the Sun.
Humans have long gazed toward the heavens, searching to put meaning and order to the universe around them. Although the movement of constellations — patterns imprinted on the night sky — was the easiest to track, other celestial events such as eclipses and the motion of planets were also charted and predicted.
Definition of astronomy: Astronomy is the study of the sun, moon, stars, planets, comets, gas, galaxies, gas, dust and other non-Earthly bodies and phenomena. In curriculum for K-4 students, NASA defines astronomy as simple “the study of stars, planets and space.” Astronomy and astrology were historically associated, but astrology is not a science and is no longer recognized as having anything to do with astronomy.
Historically, astronomy has focused on observations of heavenly bodies. It is a close cousin to astrophysics. Succinctly put, astrophysics involves the study of the physics of astronomy and concentrates on the behavior, properties and motion of objects out there. However, modern astronomy includes many elements of the motions and characteristics of these bodies, and the two terms are often used interchangeably today. Modern astronomers tend to fall into two fields: the theoretical and the observational.
Observational astronomers focus on direct study of stars, planets, galaxies, and so forth. Theoretical astronomers model and analyze how systems may have evolved.
Unlike most other fields of science, astronomers are unable to observe a system entirely from birth to death; the lifetime of worlds, stars, and galaxies span millions to billions of years. Instead, astronomers must rely on snapshots of bodies in various stages of evolution to determine how they formed, evolved and died. Thus, theoretical and observational astronomy tend to blend together, as theoretical scientists use the information actually collected to create simulations, while the observations serve to confirm the models — or to indicate the need for tweaking them. Astronomy is broken down into a number of subfields, allowing scientists to specialize in particular objects and phenomena.
Solar astronomers spend their time analyzing a single star — our sun. According to NASA, “The quantity and quality of light from the sun varies on time scales from milliseconds to billions of years.” Understanding those changes can help scientists recognize how Earth is affected. The sun also helps us to understand how other stars work, as it is the only star close enough to reveal details about its surface.
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