The earth is waking up

In the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer. Here in Ireland's temperate climate, spring flowers have popped out of the ground all of a sudden, a sign of spring to come. Evergreen trees are starting to show new tips. Hazel catkins are bright and fluffy, and the female flowers are getting ready to open. I love these seasons of rapid change. It's exhilarating to know you're catching a glimpse of something so temporary.

Celebrating the Solar Eclipse

Thanks to our impending and unexpected move, I was not as prepared as I would like to have been for the solar eclipse, but we managed to have a pretty fun day.

We had eclipse viewer glasses, but I wanted to make a pinhole viewer so I could take photos with my cell phone. I had forgotten to do that before today, though, so I had to be quick about it. I remembered seeing a picture of "2012" projected through a pinhole viewer, so I added a "2017" to mine. It was so cool, so I made more viewers with all the kids' names and my name and a heart and today's date. I only wish I'd had time to have the kids make designs.

It was neat to see how the images changed as the eclipse progressed.

While were outside viewing, my seven-year-old son and I made some observations about nature. When we first got outside, there were some ants out and about, and we received a few bites. After a little while, I noticed the ants were still around but not biting. Then the ants disappeared altogether. I sat in the grass, ant magnet that I am, and didn't see a single ant for about 45 minutes. Suddenly, they reappeared. A few minutes later, they started biting again, so we went inside, the best of the eclipse behind us. As we discussed our experience, my son pointed out that the breeze had stopped. He was right! There was no breeze a few minutes after we got out there, which I noted when I was able to stop adjusting my viewing paper because it was no longer moving. Shortly after we came inside, the breeze picked up enough to aggravate our motion-activated camera. Fascinating.

I wanted to make eclipse shirts, but I hadn't gotten to the store, so we made chalk art for the walls using cupcake liners as stencils.

When my hard-to-impress nine-year-old pulled off her stencil, she said, "COOOOOL!"

I stumbled upon an eclipse keepsake worksheet a few hours after the eclipse and had my children complete it. Nothing beats documenting their handwriting and spelling in these early years.

(I found the worksheet link in a HUGE list of resources by Life of a Homeschool Mom.)

Mikey, 7: "Geting to look at it" 

Ellie, 9: "it lookt like a fingernail moon"
(That's what she's always called a crescent moon)

Angela, 6: "See moon in front of sun"
(She wasn't the most willing participant in this.)

I wanted to do something fun and eclipse-y for dinner to finish out the day, but I didn't quite get there. Instead, we had eclipse cookies for dessert.

Overall, it was a good day for having been completely unprepared and getting less than 70% coverage. (And knowing we're moving to the path of totality in two weeks. Two weeks! How unfair is that?!)

What did you do to celebrate the eclipse? Were you in the path of totality? Did you blog about it? Share with me!

Starlight, Starbright

My new hobby is taking pictures of the stars and planets.  I recently discovered how to use the night-sky time-lapse function on my camera, and I'm going out just about every night.  Yes, I'm taking many of the same pictures over and over, but it thrills me anyway.

Top Right: Venus
Bottom Left: International Space Station as it passes through Orion, just under the "belt"

Tonight I was taking lovely pictures of the western sky with Orion on the left and Venus on the right.  I noticed one of many airplanes moving through my shot, only the path this aircraft was particularly smooth and the light wasn't blinking.  It dawned on me that it could be a satellite.  It stayed in view for a number of minutes, though, starting in the west, passing through Orion and over bright and sparkly Sirius, finally disappearing suddenly in the south.  It turns out it was the best display of the International Space Station that I've witnessed yet.  (I identified and confirmed the sighting here.)  Then I looked to the east and saw two satellites travelling north to south through Draco.  A third followed them a couple of minutes later.  The last time I saw that many satellites in that short of a time frame was when I was at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff in January of this year.  If you are ever in the area, be sure to stick around for some night viewing.  You can see so many stars and planets (we saw Jupiter in the big telescope!).  It's also dark enough to see the Milky Way, which is a fond memory of Lowell I've carried since childhood.

I discovered a website that lists satellite flybys.  I found it just in time to - in theory - spot the Hubble Space Telescope.  Unfortunately, I either missed it or couldn't see it.  I will be consulting this site in the future, though!

Another great site I found tonight is Tonight's Sky.  I recommend checking it out and discovering what you can see in your sky tonight.

A great resource for monthly viewing is SkyMaps.com.  Here is the May 2012 list.  They also have a free download each month.

On this last day of the month, I learned that April is Global Astronomy Month.  For more information, visit Astronomers Without Borders.

As the midnight hour approaches, I feel inclined to say, "Happy May Day!"