July 7 – Tanabata Matsuri (Star Festival) in Japan

In cities, streamers of colorful Tanzaku (wish cards) are hung on bamboo sticks – along streets and in public places!

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The night after the festival, the bamboo sticks and papers are often thrown into a river or burned.

Make a Tanzaku.

Write wishes on colorful paper and attach with string or ribbon to branches or poles.

Star Gaze Tonight

Most of us are quite cut off from the starry nights our ancestors enjoyed for millennia. This is because city lights have stolen night’s darkness and with it, most of the stars. In order to REALLY star gaze, you need to get out in the middle of an ocean or desert or on top of a lonely mountain.

However, just getting out of town a little ways really helps, and even just going to a dark spot inside your city or town—the middle of a park, facing a hill or forest that cuts the glare from city lights from your eyes—can make star gazing much better.

If you star gaze in dark skies, on a clear night, you will see the Milky Way. It does look rather like a river made of stars. Do you know what it is, really?

Of course it is our view of our own galaxy. If we could see the Milky Way from outside of the galaxy, it would look like the many spiral galaxies we can see in the sky.

According to SPACE.com:

Our galaxy’s center is about 30,000 light years away toward the Sagittarius star cloud; its outer edge is about 20,000 light years in the opposite direction (toward Auriga and Taurus). The Sun and all the outer stars of the galaxy revolve around it at the rate of some 155 miles per second (250 kps). It apparently requires about 200 million of our Earthly years to make one complete revolution, or one “cosmic year,” around the center of our galaxy. At the center of the Milky Way is a massive black hole containing as much material as about 3 million or 4 million Suns.