Howard Lipehutz, age 12, for his question:

How many stars can the naked eye see?

Above the desert and over the Great Lakes the sky on a clear night seems to sparkle with a billion bright stars.  Think of the clearest, starriest night you have ever seen. Now make a guess as to how many stars you could count without the help of a telescope. He gives you three hints   two hundred, two thousand or two million.

You may choose yourself a small patch of sky and make an estimate, During winter, you might pick the glittering stars of Orion, You can easily count the bright star at the top, the jewels close together in the middle and the big sparkler at the bottom. That is five and you may be able to add a few more in this, the brightest constellation we ever see,

Rising ahead of Orion, you can add the big Aldeberan and the¬V shaped group of stars on Taurus, the Bull. Rising after Orion is sparkling Sirius, brightest of all stars„ Add a few from the Big Dog and the Little Dog and above them, Castor and Pollox, the untwin sized twins„

This looks like an all night job and we are no where near a million yet, Actually, if we could count every star that we could see in any single night, the number would be only around 2,004.

Every year we swing around to face first one view, then another of the vast reaches of star sprinkled outer sp ace, Each season, different sets of stars swing into view, If we counted all the stars visible to our eyes in a whole year, we should count about 6,000,,

The southern half of our globe faces still a different view of outer space, Suppose one night we counted our 2,000 stars in one time. Them by some magic, we hopped to Cape town and started counting the stars in the view from the southern hemisphere. We could by this magic, total about 4,000 stars in a single night,

Please don't feel disappointed if you thought the number of stars was bigger than this, We may seem to see a million stars   and our telescopes really do and photograph them... There are millions and maybe billions of stars in our Gnlaxy alone. Certainly there is no shortage of stars in the Universe,