Earth is a beautiful blue and white ball when seen from space. It is a small rocky planet. Nearly ¾ of Earth is covered with water. What would we do without water! Do you know where all the water is? Earth is the only planet known to have living things. Thank you water!! One moon orbits earth and its name is Luna.

This is the sun, the king of the Solar System. The sun is a star, and it is the biggest thing in the solar system. All the planets orbit the sun. The sun is the centre of the Solar System. The sun is the closest star to Earth even though it is millions of kilometres away! It gives us light and heat and without the sun there would be no living things on our planet. Light from the sun can reach earth in only eight minutes! This is called the speed of light. The sun is huge compared to everything else in the Solar System. A million Earths could easily fit inside the sun!

This is the Earth’s moon. It is called Luna. As you know we only have one moon orbiting us. The planet Jupiter has 63 moons! The moon is a beautiful world with lots of mountains and holes called craters. The dark patches you see on the moon are there because long ago some comets and asteroids crashed into the moon so hard that lava oozed out of the rock. When this hardened it formed huge dark rocks on the moon. The moon has been explored alot in the last 50 years. The first astronaut to walk on the moon was a man from America called Neil Armstrong in 1969.

When you look at the night sky you can see many beautiful stars. If you are out in the country or camping in the mountains or the desert away from the city lights, you may see thousands of them. In a town or city, you can't see nearly as many stars because the city lights create a glow in the sky masking many of them. There are several different kinds of stars in the sky. Some are very big. A few stars have been found that are 100 to 200 times larger than the sun. Some very old stars are smaller than the Earth. Scientists study stars and place them in sets. Stars are different colours based on their temperature. Think of a fire. The coolest part of the fire is at the top of the flame where it glows red, the hotter part in the middle glows yellow, and the hottest part near the fuel glows blue. Stars work the same way. Red dwarf stars are smaller than our sun and are not as bright or hot as other stars. They burn slowly so live a very long time; as in trillions of years! They are the most common star in outer space but we hardly ever see them. Why do you think that is? There are also yellow stars, and blue giant stars.