Most days of the year, the sun goes to bed before we do. In the evening, it dips down, down, down the western sky and at last its shining face falls out of sight. The world becomes dark and if the sky is clear, the stars and perhaps the moon come out to give `. heir feeble light. And so it is, all through the night. But in the morning, there is the sun again, climbing up the eastern sky to light another day. Certainly the bright sun did not die during the night   it must have been shining somewhere else.

When you look around, the world seems to be a big flat carpet, wrinkled with hills and embroidered with fields. The blue sky seems to stretch like a huge upside down basin over our heads. In the evening, the sun seems to slide down and drop under the edge of the flat earth. But this is only how things seem to be, they really are not like this at all.

Our earth is actually a giant ball, 25,000 miles around the waist, The sky is space and it stretches far, far away in all directions. The big round earth is busy spinning around and around like a top and as it spins it travels at a great rate through the sky. And every side of the big ball is facing out at the vast oceans of empty space.

We are not alone in space. There are other planets, like our world, there is the moon and the sun and countless stars which .are other faraway suns. When we see them in the sky, we ,just happen to be facing their home in space.

As the earth spins around, we face first one view of the sky and then another.

In the morning, the spinning earth brings the sun into view and its smiling face gives us the hours of daylight. But the earth keeps on turning and soon we are facing away from the sun. It drops down out of sight when the piece of earth on which we live turns to face another part of the sky.

    But the earth, remember, is a round ball. And when we face the sun, the people on the other side of the round globe face away from the sun. They have night while we are having day. When the sun sets for us, it is rising on the opposite side of the world. For as the earth runs around half of the world is always facing the sun and enjoying daylight while the other half is sleeping through the dark hours of the night.

It takes the earth about 24 hours to make one turn around. You would think that each day and each night should be twelve hours long. But the earth orbits around the sun tilted at an angle. This complex arrangement makes our days and nights different lengths throughout the year.