I don't know how I missed it, but I did. What was surely the largest single science education outreach project in the history of our planet took place in early April, and I may as well have been on Mars.

We've mentioned before that 2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's turning a telescope to the heavens. And largely in honor of that, the United Nations has designated 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy. So let's catch up on it a bit.

April 2-5 was formally the celebration of "One Hundred Hours of Astronomy" wherein people in more than 130 countries set up telescopes to recruit their friends and neighbors to take a look at the heavens. It is estimated that more than 1 million humans got their first look at the moon, stars and planets through a telescope.

Another part of the celebration was a blitz called "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" wherein people could hook up online to see what was going on in a progressive sequence of 80 telescopes networked from every continent including Antarctica. I'd have loved to have seen it. And we'll share more developments throughoutthe year.

But -- as indicated in last week's column -- I'd like to explore a bit how we have come to know and appreciate patterns in nature.

The earliest of the sciences to push us to such things was indeed astronomy. And because it also starts with the first letter of the alphabet and this is an important year, let's start there.

Humans have pondered the stars since there were humans, of course. I have no idea who first recognized that a few of those "stars" did not stay in the same place, but progressively wandered around among the "fixed" stars, which seemingly rotate together across the sky as a group throughout each night. The few wanderers eventually took on the name planets, an Anglicized form of the Greek word for wanderers.

And from antiquity, five of them have been recognized, the ones that we know today as the "naked-eye planets": Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Indeed, Venus is often the third brightest celestial object, after the sun and moon. All five planets took on mythological and symbolic significance.

Mercury and Venus in particular may be of interest.It became clear that sometimes they appeared in the evening. But at other times these two appeared in the morning skies, before sunrise. We now know that every eight years there are a few days (as occurred in late March of this year) when they can be seen as both evening and morning stars, very low on the respective horizons. Among Christians, Venus especially, though named after a Roman goddess, came to be seen as a symbol of the death and resurrection of Christ. And Mars, of course, because it really does seem to have a reddish hue, takes its name from the Roman god of war.

From our "Eurocentric" point of view, we credit early scholars in India, Persia and Greece as among the first to try to formalize the large picture of how all these celestial bodies fit together. A few ancient scholars even perceived the sun as the center of the solar system. Most did not.

The majority, including biblical writers, seem to have held a "geocentric" view, that Earth was the center of the universe and everything somehow revolved around it. The fixed stars and the sun parade the same way across the heaven every night and day, so it is an easy leap to adopt that erroneous point of view.

But we eventually learned it was wrong -- next.

• Duane Jeffery is a professor emeritus of biology at Brigham Young University.