Stars in night sky in philadelphia?
Despite severe light pollution, there are always a few stars and planets bright enough to be visible in even our most brightly lit cities. There is nothing unusual about seeing stars or planets anywhere. Astronomers are in the business of _predicting_ real events involving the Sun, Moon, and planets, and not in the business of _prophesying_ natural disasters. That is the job of crackpots and charlatans.
Stars and the night sky**?
A star is trillions of miles away the speed of light is 670,616,629.384 mph.The next-closest star to our sun is called Proxima Centauri. It is about 25.2 trillion miles from the earth. The light of the star takes a very long time to travel to the earth. so if you do the math it takes 37 and a half hours for the light from our next closest star to get too earth. and that is the closest star. There are stars that are allot further away and it takes allot longer for their light to reach the earth.
Think about it. How many people are actually awake between 3 and 6 in the morning? This means that they are in bed with all the lights in the house turned off. If you are in an area with not a lot of light pollution, such as street lamps or floodlights, the lack of house lights will actually make a significant difference in the amount of light around, and you will see more stars at that time than at 10 to 12 at night, when the house lights are on. It IS rare to see a lot of stars in Philly, because Philly has streetlights on every block, but if your area doesn't have many, then you will see stars, especially at the times you mentioned. God has nothing to do with it.
Those were meteors. Aren’t they wonderful? 8 times in 30 minutes is completely normal. You saw the Perseid meteor shower, which runs (somewhat unpredictably) from the end of July to late August. I’m amazed so many people haven’t seen meteor showers, and more people don’t try to catch them.Here’s another image of meteors from August 2016 at Yosemite: APOD: 2016 August 18 (copyrighted, so I can’t share it directly on Quora).At its peak around August 12, the Perseid shower supposedly flared with up to 100 meteors an hour. You were lucky you caught your show towards the end of the calendar.The next promising meteor shower for the Northern Hemisphere will be the Leonids, peaking before dawn on November 17. See: EarthSky’s meteor shower guide for 2016 | EarthSky.org. On November 17, 1966, the Leonids delivered a record of thousands of meteors per minute. It must have been one of nature’s most spectacular displays of the last century.
All the stars at night in the sky, are they of our galaxy ?
there are hundreds of images of galaxies that are billions of light years away. The Hubble Telescope and other space-based and surface-based telescopes have imaged objects as far away 780 million light years (some quasars), and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey images galaxies 13 billion light years away. Other closer galaxies and clusters (like the Virgo Cluster) have been imaged by Hubble and the Keck I and Keck II telescopes in Hawaii. But to your question - the stars you see at night are just that - stars in our own galaxy. But there are also 3 galaxies visible to the naked eye on Earth. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, but is visible in the night sky in the Andromeda constellation as a hazy patch of light about the size of the full moon. The Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud are 2 smaller satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way, and are visible in the southern hemisphere (they are named such because they were first seen and reported by the explorer Magellan on his circumnavigation of the earth).
Are the stars in the night sky suns or planets?
Stars are celestial objects that are emitting heat, light, and other emissions as a result of nuclear fusion in their cores. Planets are large objects in orbits around stars. Our sun is a star. Planets can be seen in our solar system because they reflect sunlight. Planets out as far as Saturn can be seen with the naked eye. Uranus, Neptune and the "planet" Pluto are too far and dim to be seen this way. One can detect if a celestial object is a star or planet several ways. Stars twinkle. Planets don't. Through a small telescope one can see the disk of a planet. Stars always appear as just points in the sky...even through the largest optical telescopes. Also, over several days planets will move relative to the "fixed" stars in the sky. The word planet literally means "wandering star". The furthest stars we can see with the unaided eye compose the Andromeda galaxy...our galaxy Milky Way's nearest neighbor and is composed of over 100 billion stars. It appears as a very hazy patch almost the apparent size of our moon. One needs a dark clear sky far away from any light pollution.
You mean host stars visible with the naked eye? Let's try Wikipedia:List of exoplanetary host stars - Wikipediaand sort the list by apparent magnitude (5th column). In very dark circumstances stars up to the 5th magnitude can be seen with the naked eye so we get
“How do stars appear to move in the night sky?”Stars and planets appear to move because the observer is on a rotating sphere we call Earth.Imagine you are in a vehicle and look out of a side window. You will see stationary objects that appear to move in the opposite direction you are moving. If you were unaware of your movement (as we are on Earth), those objects will still appear to move.To carry this analogy a little farther, we can see why some objects (planets) appear to move backward (retrograde).When the Earth is passing another planet in its orbit, (just like when passing another vehicle on the highway,) that other planet, while still moving in the same direction appears to be backing up as the distance between the two planets increase (just like it does when passing on the highway).Randy
Are each of the "stars" we see in the night sky really just galaxies?What a strange question - how did you become so confused? Perhaps you’ve seen the Hubble Deep Field, where, except for a small number of stars that that must be at the edge of our galaxy and so are very faint, everything is a galaxy. Here is part of the Hubble Deep Field with the “local stars” circled. They are effectively point sources and their “Star of Bethlehem” spikes are a diffraction effect.The Hubble Deep Field Images – Deep Field Information It is made up of a total of 22 days of exposure time (and 50 days of observing time, as the telescope could only observe the deep field [region] for around half of every orbit.) Our best space telescope had to work very hard to take that photo.No, when we with our unaided eyes look into the night sky - especially from a dark site, a place far from city lights - we see stars that are part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our Sun is a star, but it is very bright because it is so close compared to other stars. There are a five very bright objects in the night sky that are not stars, the planets known since antiquity, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. When you check on them over several nights, several weeks, several months, you will see that they move relative to the background stars. They and we are in orbit around the Sun, and comprise the solar system. There are many other things in the solar system but they are not naked eye objects. Oh, well, comets can become naked eye objects.With the invention of the telescope, people started looking at the night sky with that instrument. In the middle of the 18th century, Charles Messier wanted to become famous for finding comets. He and other astronomers found “dim fuzzies” that didn’t move, that were not comets, so he collected that information and made a list. Otherwise he and other astronomers would spend hours waiting for them to move. M-31, the great galaxy in the constellation Andromeda is a naked eye object. M-13, the globular cluster in the constellation Hercules is also a naked eye object - I can say this because I saw it at the Texas Star Party back in 1986, a few hours after Halley’s Comet had set. Surprisingly, Messier put the open star cluster the Pleiades on his list as M-45, even though they have been known as a group of stars since antiquity, across many cultures.Galaxies are not stars - but we know they are made of stars, our telescopes have shown us that.