Learning about the Stars

It's summer here in the fabulous land down under which means warm nights and clear skies without a cloud to be seen which makes it the perfect time of year to go star hunting!

I'm not sure if all kids are the same but little miss is obsessed with the stars, the moon and planets which ends up being a lot of the stuff we talk about. It's also why we do experiments and different kinds of science education because I think it might be a passion of hers.

I ducked out and got her a cheap telescope nothing too major just a $20 one from Kmart and I wasn't expecting anything too great. I do eventually want to get a proper one but she's a bit young and I think it might end up broken. This one only lasted a few days but we'll get to why a little later.

But for now, it's off to find a dark place in the park to see if we can spot some planets and see the moon upclose!

We've mainly been using the APP Star Tracker and have done so over the past few years. It's really good and almost accurate where all you need to do is open the app and point your phone at the sky and it will tell you the star constellations.

It's a really handy tool to have and great fun there is also some magical music that plays in the background and can be quite relaxing. It even showed us when the space station zoomed passed the earth and you can use it to find planets.

As you can see from my screenshot of the open app it gives you quite a nice view. I'll often use it to teach lil miss about the planets and then we will turn to our solar system book and read up about each planet we can find.

Some nights the planets are close enough that you can see them with your own eyes. They just resemble other stars except for Mars at it always has a red tinge to it. Other planets appear brighter in the night sky and its good fun.

So How Did We Go?

I'd love to be able to say we had a stellar time and upload images from the telescope but as it turns out the old $20 Kmart telescope turned out to be an utter flop. Or we ended up with a dudd because not a single ounce of light came through with the only thing it being able to pick up being the moon but it came through as a distorted glowing orb.

We chuckled and laughed and lil miss asked if all telescopes were like this to which I responded no and that I would get her a proper one one day just not yet then we could look up to the stars every night.

The Telescope came with a 50x and 100x zoom lense but they both provided the same distorted view and unfortunately it lays in pieces currently because lil miss with her curiosity decided to pull it apart to see how it works.

Just mirrors dad! The mirrors are probably broken. and that was her assessment of what had occurred and why it didn't work.

How are your children? Do they look upon the stars and dream also?