How knowledgeable are you about Kintyre’s night sky? This seasonal quiz is based on Keith Wilson’s ‘Seeing Stars’ articles published over the last year and a half.
How many can you answer without looking at the answers?
The answers will be published in next week’s edition of the Courier, alongside the next ‘Seeing Stars’ column.
1. Which of these is not an annual meteor shower?
a. Orionids
b. Perseids
c. Halleys
2. What are The Pleiades or ‘Seven Sisters’?
a. Constellation
b. Star cluster
c. Galaxy
3. Which of these stars is in the constellation Orion?
a. Polaris
b. Procyon
c. Rigel
4. Which of these is not a naked eye planet?
a. Uranus
b. Mercury
c. Saturn
5. The International Space Station can often be seeing passing over our sky from…?
a. East to west
b. West to east
c. South to north
6. Where would you find ‘The Sickle’ in our night sky?
a. Hercules
b. Leo
c. Gemini
7. How many Galilean moons orbit Jupiter?
a. 4
b. 3
c. 6
8. Germans call it the ‘Great Wagon’. What do we call it?
a. The Great Bear
b. The Plough
c. The Great Square
9. In the night sky, the evening star is the same as the morning star, but what is it?
a. Venus
b. Moon
c. North Star
10. Roughly what height do ‘night-shining’ clouds appear?
a. 5km
b. 80km
c. 15km
11. When a rock from space lands on Earth, what is it called?
a. Meteorite
b. Meteor
c. Meteoroid
12. Which of these stars is not part of the Summer Triangle?
a. Vega
b. Deneb
c. Sirius
13. The constellation Pegasus represents what?
a. A horse
b. A goat
c. A fish
14. What is the furthest object you can see with the naked eye?
a. Milky Way galaxy
b. Orion nebula
c. Andromeda galaxy
15. In the Kintyre night sky photo, which constellation is Santa’s sleigh passing by?
a. Ursa Major (The Great Bear)
b. Cygnus (The Swan)
c. Orion (The Hunter)
16. Roughly how many planets have been discovered outside our solar system?
a. 50
b. 500
c. 5000
17. How many Apollo missions with astronauts landed on the Moon?
a. 5
b. 6
c. 7
18. When does a lunar eclipse take place?
a. When the Moon is on the far side of the Sun
b. When Earth is between the Moon and the Sun
c. When the Moon is between Earth and the Sun
19. Which objects in our solar system are nicknamed ‘dirty snowballs’?
a. Comets
b. Dwarf planets
c. Asteroids
20. Where do the high energy particles that cause the Northern Lights come from?
a. Moon
b. Deep space
c. Sun
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