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There is no uncertainty that astronomy is the oldest science and there is also no hesitation that astronomy was being studied by everyone, not only the wise men, thousands and thousands of years ago.

We do not understand exactly why they did it, but we can surmise that early man noticed a correlation between the weather and the stars, which were themselves not fully understood, of course.

Early man, probably even as far back as Neanderthal man, noticed the relationship between the weather and herd movements and crop growth, or at least fruit and nuts on local trees, if they did not have planted crops.

This means that people could see a connection between the stars and food availability. This relationship was probably ritualized into some sort of religion like early Wicca. Therefore, the stars became a very important part of the lives of every single person and it is likely that astrology and astronomy were widely intermixed by the average person.

However, there were also people who did not only use the stars as some enormous celestial clock and who tried to make sense of the whole shebang. I am going to narrate below, eight of the most important dates or years in the history of astronomy before Christ walked on the Earth. Never forget that they had nothing but an abacus to do there calculations and no telescopes, which came about two thousand years later.

585 BC: Thales of Miletus (c. 625- c. 547), a Greek, predicted a solar eclipse in Asia Minor purely on the basis of his observations and calculations. It was not a lucky guess!

c. 400 BC: the astronomer Oenopedes (5th. century). also a Greek, announces that the Earth is tilted on its axis with respect to the Sun.

352 BC: the Chinese report what they called a ‘guest star’, a supernova, which was the earliest reported sighting.

340 BC: The astronomer, Kidinnu (b. Babylon c. 379 BC) discovers the precession of the Equinoxes, ie the apparent change in the position of the stars caused by the Earth’s wobbling on its axis.

c. 300 BC: a ‘committee’ of Chinese astronomers compile star maps of the visible universe.

c. 240 BC: Chinese astronomers observe and make notes about Halley’s Comet. Also Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 - c.194 BC), a Greek, correctly calculate the Earth’s dimensions.

165 BC: Chinese astronomers notice sunspots for the first time.

c. 130 BC: the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (b. 147 BC), a Greek, correctly calculates the distance to the Earth’s Moon and also rediscovers the precession of the Equinoxes.

You will notice from the dates above that obviously not everyone let nature and the stars govern their lives, as the comon farmer or hunter did. Some men actually put pen to paper, but before pen and paper even existed, and tried to work out ‘why these manifestations occurred?’.

These people must have been remarkable men to have worked these measurements out by calculation, observation by the naked eye and rationalization alone.

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Although astronomy is the oldest science, it continues to be at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but that of the public at large too. Who has not looked up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered? Having said that though, the ancient people of certainly the northern hemisphere, but probably both, knew the movements of the stars and planets better than most of us do nowadays.

They understood even then, thousands of years ago, that most stars appear to appear in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ’stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they travelled ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were not the same as those seen in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 - 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the celestial bodies than the average common man of today does. (I mean men and women here, naturally).

They learned how to calculate or at least find the extremities of the sunrise and went to extraordinary lengths to mark those positions with huge stone structures, such as Stonehenge in the UK, probably to facilitate the location of certain positions of the sun or other planets or stars, which may have been important to their religious beliefs or crop cycles.

In 1609, Galileo invented the first artificial device for studying the stars and planets. It was the first astronomical telescope and through it he was able to see objects millions of miles away that no person had ever seen before. Because of the deductions he drew from his observations, he clashed with the Roman Catholic Church and was often in serious danger for his life, so radical were his discoveries.

But mankind was not intimidated, and since then we have gone on to build ever bigger and ever better telescopes with which we can even detect radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, infrared waves and gamma waves from outer space. Forty years ago, we even travelled to our Moon. and we have sent probes to eight of the nine planets in our Solar System, as well as to several comets and asteroids.

Where will we go next? That decision was always up to the government of the USA and the old USSR, but now there are other contestants in the field. What will China or India want to explore with their possibly slightly different outlook on life? Or will it be only a question of financial benefit?

The world may be in a state of flux and power may be shifting from its traditional seats, but it has not diminished interest in questions that scientists think can only be answered in space. These are exciting times in the science of astronomy, but then man has always found astronomy exciting.

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