Page:Astronomy for Everybody.djvu/30

another way, the sun is merely one of the stars. Compared with its fellows it is rather a small one, for we know of stars that emit thousands or even tens of thousands of times the light and heat of the sun. Measuring things simply by their intrinsic importance, there is nothing special to distinguish our sun from the hundreds of millions of its companions. Its importance to us and its comparative greatness in our eyes arise simply from the accident of our relation to it.

The great universe of stars which we have described looks to us from the earth just as it looked to us during our imaginary flight through it. The stars which stud our sky are the same stars which we saw on our flight. The great difference between our view of the heavens and the view from a point in the starry distances is the prominent position occupied by the sun and planets. The former is so bright that during the daytime it completely obliterates the stars. If we could cut off the sun's rays from any very wide region, we should see the stars around the sun in the daytime as well as by night. These bodies surround us in all directions as if the earth were placed in the centre of the universe, as was supposed by the ancients.

We may connect what we have just learned about the the universe at large with what we see in the heavens. What we call the heavenly bodies are of two classes. One of these comprises the millions of stars the arrangement and appearance of which we have just described.