Interesting Space Facts: Part 1

Below are some interesting space facts, courtesy of PlanetFacts.net:

If one were to capture and bottle a comet's 10,000 mile vapor trail, the amount of vapor actually present in the bottle would take up less than 1 cubic inch of space.

Members of the Dogon tribe in Mali, Africa, for many centuries worshiped a star known today by astronomers as Sirius B. The Dogon people knew its precise elliptical orbit, knew how long it took to revolve around its parent star, Sirius, and were aware that it was made up of materials not found on Earth—all this centuries before modern astronomers had even discovered that Sirius B existed.
Deimos, one of the moons of mars, rises and sets twice a day.

To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.

Saturn's rings are 500,000 miles in circumference but only about a foot thick.

Five times as many meteors can be seen after midnight as can be seen before.

The star Zeta Thauri, a supernova, was so bright when it exploded in 1054 that it could be seen during the day.

When we look at the farthest visible star we are looking 4 billion years into the past—the light from that star traveling at 186,000 miles a second, has taken that many years to reach us.

The telescope on Mount Palomar, California, can see a distance of 7,038,835,200,000,000,000,000 miles.

The sun is 3 million miles closer to the Earth during the winter than the summer.

The diameter of the star Betelgeuse is more than a quarter the size of our entire solar system.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the Earth.

The Earth moves in its 585-million-mile orbit around the sun approximately eight times faster than a bullet travels.