This should have been a big success...

Jr. scientist E is obsessed with the moon. Every time my computer is out she asks to look at the pictures of the moon in our telescope gallery and she loves looking at the moon whenever it's out. So I've been excitedly waiting for the moon to be visible at a time when she'd be awake so we could look at it through the telescope. Tonight was finally the night. I set up the telescope, attached the camera so she could look at the camera screen instead of the much-more-difficult eye lens, and waited for the excitement. She was completely uninterested. I guess for a two-year-old the concept of looking down at a screen to see something up in the sky didn't make sense.

First planet sighting

We caught our first look at a planet through our telescope tonight. We were able to see Jupiter, along with it's moons (the picture doesn't do it justice). We weren't even sure it was a planet at first (and we didn't know which planet until we got home and looked it up - yes, we're very amateur astronomers). We noticed a big bright thing in a part of the sky where there should have been nothing bright, according to our star wheel. At first we thought it was an airplane, like all those bright "stars" we see that flash red and blue, but through the telescope it was clearly a beautifully round planet, surrounded by a diagonal line of moons (o.k., we didn't figure out that those were moons until we looked up pictures of Jupiter). It was a very exciting night.

Stargazing

Since about the only thing in the sky that I can name is the moon, I decided to try to learn how to identify the various celestial objects. I found a great site for a print-at-home star wheel that shows the positions of the stars at different months and times of night and went out for a stargazing walk with Jr. Scientist A. After explaining to him what the star wheel did, he started pointing to every star he saw asking me what it was called. He's always been interested in outer space, but this was a level of enthusiasm that I rarely see. Although I'm sure my star and constellation naming was less than completely accurate (I'm pretty sure I labeled a few airplanes as stars), both Jr. Scientist A and I had a great time.

Homemade compass

We decided to build our own compass to help orient us for our stargazing. We magnetized a paperclip using our dangerously powerful- magnet (rubbing the paperclip across the magnet many times). We filled a container with water and put our now magnetized paperclip on a piece of cork in the water. The paperclip and cork slowly rotated until it was oriented north-south. We spun the cork around multiple times and it kept re-orienting itself. Pretty cool to see this invisible force at work (although next time I'll use a round piece of cork so it doesn't get stuck on the edge of the container without being able to turn). Jr. Scientist A liked the experiment, but I have a sense that the underlying concept of the earth having a magnetic field was a little too advanced.