Mothering Many

I’m talking about the total lunar eclipse I forgot about this morning! And also constellations! And meteor showers, and! and! and! Now, you know stuff like that is much easier to see with the proper equipment, right? With binoculars, the beauty of the celestial bodies is just almost overwhelming, and BuyTelescopes.com says they have the best astronomy binoculars. Myself, I’d rather have a telescope, but only because I can focus it on what the children need to look at, and then have them step up to it. That way, I can be sure we are all talking about the same thing!

Is this where I admit that I have never seen the rings of Saturn except in pictures? And that I really, really want to hear my children GASP when they do? I’m seriously considering this Meade 70AZ-AR Altazimuth Refractor for us. It’s not too terribly expensive, and…..I want it. I really, really want it.

The launchpad is now ready for our departures. This is where we keep the stuff that we need to grab before we head out the door. The game shirts for the flag team (yeah, cause I didn’t think I had enough laundry???), the diaper bag, the cooler bag, etc. As you can see, it was piled ridiculously high, and pretty un-useable.

If you remember, I mentioned that we will be studying stars this term. I asked the children what they wanted learn about, and they gave me several questions that interest them, such as:

• what is the lifecycle of a star?
• why are stars so hot?
• what is a shooting star?
• what do the colors mean?
• what is the shape of a star?
• what are some constellations?

Now it just so happens that I have a constellation experiment lined up already, but as you can see from the rest of the questions, I have my homework cut out for me, LOL!
I found a website today that may help me quite a bit with that. Now, you may think from the name that they only sell things, but that’s not true. I found several good articles there, as well as telescope reviews, forums and classifieds. Yep, they have classifieds, too. You can even find used binoculars for sale!

Now, if I had visited Astromart yesterday, I would not have sent my boys back to bed when they woke up with me at 6AM. I’d have pointed out the Total Lunar Eclipse, instead.