Stargazing with a 9 3/4 year old

I took Marissa on a stargazing field trip in Grandpa's pasture last night. What an experience that was. We got the telescope on Saturn but it is so low on the western horizon now when it is dark enough to see, it is hard to really get a good look at anyway and forget trying to find Titan.

Then after much debate and finally making her sit on my lap so she could see we were looking at the same things we identified Libra, Virgo and Scorpio. Scorpio which sits toward the center of the galaxy is usually an amazing sight with a pair of binocs but it sits to the south right over The City of Driggs from our pasture location and for those of you who haven't noticed Driggs suffers from a deplorable case of light pollution now--- who would have ever thought. Oh well maybe I will need to go to our bulk plant to stargaze some night.

Marissa thought she needed to name a star last night,so she laid back, looked up and chose a very bright, almost- blue directly over head. We are reading the book , The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman aloud right now, so she decided to name that blue Lyra after the main character in the story. For those of you that aren't familiar with this stuff the big, bright, almost- blue directly over head at this time of the year is Vega, it was the pole star a few thousand years ago and will be again in a few thousand more and it sits in the constellation Lyra. We had a good laugh about the whole thing and named a different star Lyra but I bet she doesn't soon forget that lesson.

Our main quarry for the evening was suppose to be Jupiter which cleared the Eastern horizon at about 10:30 pm. But we had to wait for it to get a little higher so it would clear some of the atmospheric distortion---it is amazing how cold 59 degrees can feel after a day spent at 90 degrees---we got too cold so we gave up and came in before we looked at Jupiter. But it is rising a little earlier every evening, in a week we won't have to wait for it to rise high enough before we freeze. And I will get to spend another amazing evening stargazing with my daughter.