The Iridescent Gold Star Christmas Tree Toppers is 13 inches high total and 11 inches wide. There are 5 points on the large star tree toppers. The bottom connector is 4 inches tall. The star is made of acrylic and is painted gold with multi-colored glitter. This gold iridescent star tree topper is perfect for large Christmas trees. For indoor use only. Complete use and care instructions are included.
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 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.