May 25, 2025
A Tale of Two Days and The Neighbor’s Kids
Across the street from our house is a family with several kids, ranging, I’m guessing from about 10 to about 5, maybe??? All boys. Anyway, I spoke to the parents several weeks ago about showing the kids something in the sky, starting probably with the sun. Well, the occasion finally presented itself a few days ago; the 22nd specifically. I set the solar scope up, confirmed that I could get a good image of the sun, and went across the street to ask the kids if they wanted to look through a telescope at the sun. Two minutes later, after checking (hopefully) with a parent, they were over ready to look at the sun. And this is what they saw:
May 22, 2025
The main feature that the kids could see was the large prominence. It was soon apparent that they had never looked through a telescope before. A big part of this was to introduce the kids to astronomy, and I think I successfully did that. Did it make a lasting impression? Who knows? They did ask a lot of questions, which was good. They were unaware of the distance from the earth to the sun, and that the sun was a looooong way away. They also got to see the clouds scurrying across the sun, since we were mostly viewing between the clouds. They thought that was cool.
As a followup to that session, I had hoped to show them the sun a day or so later to show them the rotation that had occurred. I got an image, but the kids weren’t around to look through the scope to see firsthand the changes. You can see for yourself the rotation and other surface changes.
