Learn with the best! Did you know you can see a galaxy 2½ million light-years away with your unaided eyes? Craters on the Moon with binoculars? Countless wonders await you any clear night. The first step in astronomy for beginners is simply to look up and ask, “What’s that?” Planetarium of Crete has recruited the most experienced telescope operators and hundreds of sky object can be inside your plate in a few seconds.
Stars are the most numerous objects visible in the sky. On a clear dark night, you’ll see about 3,000 stars with your unaided eye. Binoculars or a telescope reveal tens of thousands more.
Every star you see belongs to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which holds some 200 billion stars altogether. Many stars astronomers suspect most stars are born together and gravitationally connected to one or more companion stars.
Some stars with widely-spaced companions, especially if they are nearby, can be resolved directly with a telescope.
After the hot stars near the center of an emission nebula push away the remaining gas and dust, a group of a few dozen to a few hundred young stars remain clustered together. These groups are called open star clusters, and they are often found along the Milky Way. They are beautiful to observe, especially in dark sky where they look like dazzling jewels set against the black velvet of deep space.
All the stars, nebulae, and star clusters you see at night are part of a single galaxy: our Milky Way. But the Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope and large earth-based telescopes have mapped and catalogued galaxies out to a distance of some 12-13 billion light years. The light from these galaxies left just a couple of billion years after the formation of the universe.
Welcome to our telescope guided tours. We have developed special presentations for every level of astronomy lover, from beginners to experts. Sky maps, red flash lights and telescopes will be tools for your exploration of the universe. Planetarium of Crete has some of the biggest telescopes in Greece and our very well trained staff can offer you one of the most beautiful nights you have ever spent.