Eight Point Silver Christmas Tree Toppers.

Our Eight Pointed Silver Christmas Tree Toppers are 7.5 inches across and 9.5 inches tall. The silver eight pointed star Christmas tree toppers have a silver glitter center star with a � inch wide solid silver border. The eight pointed star silver tree topper is made of plastic. The eight pointed silver Christmas star tree toppers are identical on both the front and the back. There is a 2-inch silver tube to attach the silver eight pointed star tree toppers to your tree.

Select this link to view our Lighted Stars and Fiber Optic Angel Christmas Tree Toppers.

How Stars are used to Tell Directions.
The stars have always been used as guiding beacons in the sky. Since earliest times the North Star has helped sailors find their way across the trackless seas. Desert travelers have used stars to guide them. The Bible tells the beautiful story of the Star of Bethlehem that guided the Wise Men to the stable in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus lay in a manger. Even today, we use the stars to help guide our ships and airplanes.

How the Stars are used with Atomic Energy.
The study of the stars, including our sun, taught men the basic facts about how to make the powerful hydrogen bomb. Astronomers wondered how the stars could continue to shoot out such a tremendous amount of light and heat and not burn up in just a few years. They found that the stars seem to change atoms of hydrogen into atoms of helium. In the process some of the atomic material is changed into the energy of light and heat.
The stars have been put to other important uses as well. The value of star study cannot be measured only in terms of practical uses. Today as always, man marvels at the skies above and dreams for a better understanding of the universe. A good way to study the stars is to learn how to recognize the main constellations and read about how astronomers have learned what they know.

How Many Stars Are There?
Nobody know how many stars there are. Even on a clear night, you probably can see only about 2,000 stars with the naked eye. That is partly because you can see only the stars that are overhead in your part of the earth. The curve of the earth and the thickness of the atmosphere above you both cut down the number of stars that you can see. But the main reason you cannot see more is that many of the stars are so far away that their light is too dim to be seen with the naked eye. The great glass eyes of the telescopes can see much dimmer light than your eyes can see. A telescope with a mirror eye that is 100 inches across could see a burning candle about 6,800 miles away.
The great Hale telescope at Mount Palomar in California collects starlight on a mirror that is 200 inches across. It can gather a million times more light than your eyes can. With such large telescopes, astronomers can photograph over thirty billion stars. We think there must be billions more beyond the reach of our most powerful telescopes.

How Far Away Are the Stars?
Imagine that our sun is the size of the dot at the end of this sentence. Then the next nearest star to us would be another small dot about 10 miles away. Other stars would be hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Of the billions of stars in the heavens, only seventeen are within twelve light years of the earth. A light year is the distance that light, traveling 186,000 miles a second, will go in a year�s time. The big Hale telescope on Mount Palomar, California, has photographed groups of stars that are believed to be about 1,600 million light years away. A more powerful telescope would probably find stars even further away.

How Large Are the Stars?
Most of the stars seem to be about the size of our sun, which has a diameter of 865,000 miles. There are tiny stars, called white dwarfs, which are only about 17,000 miles in diameter. There is also one super giant, which is more than two billion, four hundred million miles across. This star is so big that our sun, together with the earth at its distance of about 93 million miles from the sun could be placed twenty five times in a row across the middle of the super giant.
Stars differ as greatly in weight as they do in size. The tiny white dwarfs are amazingly heavy. A cubic inch of a dwarf star might weigh several tons. On the other hand, a cubic foot of a super giant might weigh less than 1/1000 of an ounce.