Silver Star Christmas Tree Toppers is 14 inches high total and 12 inches wide. There are 5 points on the large star tree toppers. The bottom connector is 3 inches tall. The holiday star tree topper has spiral designs on the front and back. The large Christmas star tree topper is made of wire and is painted silver with glitter and iridescent glitter. This silver iridescent star tree topper is perfect for medium or large Christmas trees. For indoor use only.
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The Nativity Star: The star symbolizes the star that appeared, quite miraculously, in the eastern sky on the birth of Jesus Christ. The star is believed to have guided shepherds and the magi, who were the three wise men from the East, to the newborn king. One wonders whether the star that shined that night was any different from those of today. The star was indeed a strange star and people continue to believe that a miracle occurred at the birth of Christ.
The Christmas star continues to adorn the churches and houses as part of the traditional Christmas celebrations. The star stands for high hopes and ideals, a hope for a good fortune and to reach above oneself.
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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.
Movement of the Stars.
It is the motion of air that makes the stars seem to twinkle and it is the motion of the earth that makes the stars seem to rise in the east, move across the heavens and set in the west. This seeming daily motion of the stars is the result of the earth’s spinning around on its axis.
What seems to be another motion of the stars is also the result of the earth’s movements. You may have noticed that different star groups or constellations appear overhead at different seasons of the year. This is because the earth is rushing along in a great circle around the sun. So, at one time of the year, we look out at nighttime on one part of the heavens. Six months later, our earth has moved to the other side of the sun. Then we look out at nighttime on the other part of the heavens.
The stars, themselves, do move. Even our sun is rushing through space at a speed of about 43,000 miles an hour.