Dear Journal,                                           May 20,2014

I am finally at the Science Research Academy (SRA). We are studying the PHASES as our first class assignment. I found out that we have eight moon phases, NEW MOON, FULL MOON, WAXING crescent, WAXING gibbous, WANING crescent, WANING gibbous, first quarter and third quarter. The explanation for the Earths different moon phases is  because the moon revolves around the Earth as the Earth revolves around the sun. We also learned the reason we have seasons. The seasons transpire because of the Earths tilt toward the North Star, the tilt is 23.45 degrees, the axis will always be turned toward the North Star.  The moon phases is not all that we learned today, we also learned about the sun. The sun is 4.6 billion years old. The diameter is 1.4million kilometers in length.The color is a yellow/orange. When the sun has dark areas on the surface they are called SUNSPOTS. SOLAR FLARES are sudden explosions on the sun’s surface.They release huge amounts of different forms of energy.Surface features on the sun are always temporary. The surface temperature of the sun is 5500 degrees Celsius. The sun is the largest star in our solar system. A star is a sphere of hot, glowing gases that give off their own light and is held together by gravity.  STARS with similar characteristics usually form STAR CLUSTERS which are in groups near each other. We studied of two types of star clusters. First a globular cluster is a ball-shaped group made up of closely packed old stars. Second a open cluster is comprised of fewer, more spread out, and younger stars.  Finally we talked about different galaxies. A galaxy is an extremely large group of stars, space dust, and gases held together by gravity. There are three different types of galaxies spiral, elliptical, and irregular. Bell just rang got to go until next time.

Darcey