Raising an Astronomer

My son is my constant companion for observing the sky. He is even more enthusiastic about space than I am!

Most of my time spent observing the sky is in the company of my five-year-old son. He is completely obsessed with space. It began about a year ago, when he discovered that there was a "10th" planet. His obsession before space was numbers, and when he read that there were nine planets, he asked where the tenth one was, thinking there should be an even number. I taught him about the large Kuiper Belt object named Sedna, and from then on he was hooked.

I began with pointing out the planets to him in the night sky and showing him how they were different from stars. Fortunately, bright Venus and Jupiter were sunset objects at the time. And pointing a telescope at Jupiter allowed him to catch the moons of Jupiter, leading him to want to learn about which planets have moons and don't have moons, which are gas planets, and so forth. I recall him waking me up in the wee hours one morning, whispering, "It's 5:00 a.m. and Saturn is rising. I haven't seen that planet yet, will you point it out to me?" Without opening my eyes, I said, "It's cloudy, honey. Go back to sleep."

He spends a lot of time on the computer using either our Celestron's The Sky software or wunderground.com's interactive star chart, learning what he can see in the sky tonight and then changing the dates and times to see how close he can cluster planets. He frequently bemoans the fact that he missed getting to see close conjunctions from before he was born.

Currently he has expanded out from his beloved planets and moon to the constellations. I had a game from when I was younger called Constellation Station. I dug it back out and began playing it with him. So in addition to his encyclopedic knowledge of everything in the solar system, he can now also tell you which constellations are up in the night sky for different seasons, what the common names to the constellations are, and the names of the 25 brightest stars and which constellation they reside in. Of course this is for the Northern Hemisphere only. I'm going to give him a while to digest all this information before I fill him in on the fact that the Southern Hemisphere gets to see totally different constellations. Not only that, but down there they can see galaxies that are visible to the naked eye! I'm sure he will immediately require a vacation to visit these exotic locales. I'd better start saving my money.