Despite being pox-ridden, Ben decided he wanted to be a football player this evening. He got dressed in his shorts and red t-shirt so that everybody would know he was a footballer and then dragged me outside to play football. Well, I say dragged, I actually volunteered because I’m trying to encourage him in his sporting endeavours so that he has some hope of being less of a sporting klutz than his father.
We kicked the ball about a bit and I explained the concept of dribbling the ball to Ben. Eventually Ben settled on playing goalie, which he really enjoyed.
After ten or fifteen minutes Ben got distracted by the moon, then asked me, “Is that Mars?” and pointed a patch of rapidly darkening blue sky. “Errr, I don’t know, perhaps. It’s certainly the right place.”
Ben and I have been making tentative steps into the world of astronomy. This is something I used to love and I’d spend cold evenings out the back of my parent’s house learning the constellations when I was a teenager.
A couple of months back Ben expressed an interest in the stars one night when we were getting out of the car and he happened to look up. Keen to foster his interest in something I love, we dug out an astronomy book that was a dust-gathering Christmas present from a few years ago. We’ve been looking at it together on and off since then.
Ben is very interested in the constellations and can now identify his first, Casseopia, or “the lady in the sky” as he calls it. The advantage of this constellation is that it’s high in the sky — currently you just look straight up in the UK — it’s bright, and it’s easy to spot: five stars in a W shape. I’m attempting to show him The Plough but it’s too close to the horizon currently and the atrocious light pollution doesn’t help either.
About ten minutes after Ben had asked about Mars, I glanced up again and there, pretty much the only thing in the sky besides the moon, was the red twinkling dot of Mars. Damn kids with their working eyes.
One thing I discovered while starting to pick up on the astronomy again is Stellarium. It’s simply… well, stellar! If you have evening a passing interesting in the stars you should check out this amazing, free piece of software.