Difference between Seeing and Observing

Yesterday night, I was taking photos of the stars and moon as we had a power failure in our suburb. I was really amazed at the moon and the stars making a shape of a smiley face. I was also amazed to see how bright two of the stars looked in the sky which formed eyes of the smiley face.

Today when I was reading the local news paper, a picture of the same smiley face was shown and it said that the two bright eyes of the smiley face were Venus and Jupiter.

Had I paid more attention to the bright eyes of the smiley face, I would have noticed that the light emitted from those eyes are not twinkling as does with the stars but remains steady as does with the planets. I learned in year 4 in India that stars light twinkles during night time and light from planets remain steady.

Now a days we are bombarded with lots of information every minute. We have information from the newspaper, television, internet (one of the major source of mass information), colleagues, friends and everyone else. Due to this massive bombardment of information, we have started to just see things and not observe it.

There is a huge difference between just seeing things and observing them. We are human beings, highly intelligent of all animal species present on the surface of earth, and have great power to communicate and observe. If we loose one of these qualities, we will soon be going back to the stone ages where people hunt to feed and just lived together to feel secured.