Last night I spent a few hours showing my girlfriend's daughter Stellarium and a couple of astronomy books I have. I also explained to her what Nebula, open star clusters, and globular clusters were. I also informed her that Sirius is pronounced like Sirius from Harry Potter and that the star Sirius is actually a double star. I then proceeded to search for pictures of it to show her how tiny the second star is and why you can't see it through the telescope. I quickly went over how to use the Planisphere I have and showed her the larger star chart I have also. Luckily these things come pretty cheep since I'm a bit broke, you can also find these things for free online if you wish to. Here is a link to a free print out of a Planisphere , and here is a link to a free star chart.
I put the telescope out last night around 19:00 to let it cool down; the temperature was about 12°F so it needed a while to cool down. The skies were a bit cloudy, but within 45 minutes it was extraordinarily clear. Stars were very sharp pin pricks in the sky, no blurs and nebula's and galaxies were as visible as I've ever seen them since I got my scope. I was pretty happy that I was going to introduce her to some objects in the sky.
None of what I viewed was new to me, but since I knew right where everything was up in the sky I went out and started aiming at targets and calling her over to look through the eyepiece. I had shown her what we were going to look at using Stellarium, but I had to warn her that nebula and galaxies weren't going to be as bright and colorful as they appear on there. Didn't want to give her a false impression of what she was going to view through the telescope. Just to be quick here is the list of what we viewed, we must have spent around 30-40 minutes total viewing all these objects.
- Pleiades M45
- Open Cluster M41
- Double Cluster NGC 884 and 869
- Orion Nebula M42
- Bode's Galaxy M81 and M82
- Sirius
She really seems to be enjoying looking at it and what I've taught her so far, she's even been reading, or more like skimming and viewing the pretty pictures, through two of the books I have. Looks like I have created a little monster. I better get to researching and learning more before I run out of stuff to teach her. I figured she would enjoy it at her age, I know I wish I had a telescope when I was that young, but either way I love the fact that I have one now.
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