A day off from the cold weather becomes a day of astronomy fun at home.
The frigid temperatures in the Upper Midwest combined with my son's feverish cold meant that he was guaranteed a day off from school yesterday. The first order of business was staying warm and keeping healthy, which we did with layers of clothes and regular doses of medicine.
The next job was to keep him and his little sister occupied all day. For the most part they can occupy themselves either individually or collaboratively for hours on end.
After a failed attempt at getting them to nap, I fired up the computers so they would each have a place it sit and play quietly. Meanwhile I went and sat out by the TV to relax after finishing my chores for the day. I had some shows saved on my DVR for a couple of months so I decided to watch them so I could clear them out.
The first was Carl Sagan's Cosmos - Encyclopedia Galatica. Because I already have a strong background in most things astronomical, the part that interested me most was the story of Champollion deciphering the Rosetta Stone and traveling to Egypt where he was able to read the mysterious hieroglyphics. This was very appealing to my puzzle side (I create crossword and other puzzles for newspapers and magazines). When Sagan began to compare this unlocking of another culture's "secret code" to the quest for life in space, my son wandered out to join me. We watched the rest of the show together, and he then asked if we could play Constellation Station. I took him up on it.
We hadn't played this board game for quite some time, with the intervening interest he has had in NASCAR lately, school which takes up so much of his time, and the assorted Christmas presents and other board games he received. So we sat and played the game while watching the next show I had on tape, The Planets, an overview of the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini missions. It kept us both watching when it was not our turn. I could tell my son's temperature was creeping back up throughout the hour as he relinquished all moving of pieces to me and contented himself with throwing the dice and little more. Even so, he managed to beat me by almost 100 points. It had been so long that I had forgotten some of the bright star's home locations. Achernar? I could not remember and lost 20 points right there, although it still wouldn't have brought me a victory. (If you're keeping track, Achernar lies in Eridanus.)
At the end of the game we have to use Celestron's The Sky software to determine where the planets are in the constellations and whoever had those constellations gets extra points. (This is also my daughter's turn to ransack the board and play with the colored pegs to her heart's content.) As soon as we had our totals, my son opted to stay at the computer and play with the planetarium software while I prepared his medicine and our dinner. By this time it was dark and clear (although still dangerously cold) so we were able to stand at the window and peek at brilliant Venus and an easily spottable Mercury dropping toward the horizon. In two nights Venus will meet Uranus and we hope for better weather to get the telescope out and get a rare peek at Uranus.
