Telescope Reviews: a kid's first time behind the glass, show and tell

a couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and i took her neice, ash, out one evening to 'show and tell stargaze'. she had just finished school for the year, and the astronomy section of her science class had just been concluded. she has lots of knowledge of the solar system for her age of 9 years. she's throwing out facts like how the planets move, the number of moons that jupiter has (out dated a little in her textbook, but for all practical purposes, 16 is close enough, and many other impressive tidbits).

anyway, it's a saturday night and i take the lx90 out to the local baseball field and setup shop. just about the time i'm ready to align, the clouds roll in. this isn't very good news, especially since ash had been looking forward to this for a couple of months, now.

fortunately, though, we were able to get glimpses of jupiter through light cloud cover several times and she 'discovered' 3 moons and 5 or 7 cloud bands (isn't it amazing how 'little eyes' work so well!?!). she was extatic! saturn was too low, but the beehive cluster was close to jupiter and she got a gander at that for a little while. she couldn't believe how many stars were grouped together.

when the clouds rolled in too thickly, we called it a night and went home to eat some chowder.

ash has sinced asked if we could see the sun in a telescope? when will she be able to see saturn? when does mars rise, and can we look at it next time? what else is out there? i answered her questions as best i could, but i hope that the next time, i can show her more answers than i can tell her.

the sky's a great thing to share with those who are younger or older than you or i. i just hope that our next 'stargazing' adventure will be more show and explain and less tell and trust.

but, now i have a suncatcher that she made for me that looks like saturn to remind us of her first time behind the glass.

ds