Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

First stargazing of the term pushed through last night. I’ve had some of my co-teachers schedule a stargazing session before, but it always got postponed and/or cancelled because of the bad weather. I haven’t even risked scheduling any stargazing for my astronomy classes in case they get bogged down in continual disappointment.

Earlier in the day, at the time I’m supposed to decide if the session will push through or not (at 5pm), my co-teacher who scheduled it for her class was actually hesitating of continuing. From the department I had only seen the sky on the side of the building that is facing the sunset, and I could see blue all the way, so I told her we should go ahead.

Walking between the buildings some time later though going to the observatory, I saw that there were thin white clouds covering the central 60% of the sky. Now, the thing is, in those kinds of situations, it’s still the requesting teacher’s prerogative if they want to proceed with the session. There’s still the possibility that the sky would clear after the half-hour or hour-long lecture (depending on how soon we needed to go to the roof deck). If not, there’s always something the teacher could bring up in the test from the lecture, plus terrestrial viewing - but more on that later.

Looking at my co-teacher’s schedule, I realized this was a lecture class she had arranged for, so we’re talking about a maximum of 45 students. And there were 30+ who showed up.

The lecture was okay. I got the usual reactions upon showing some renditions of the constellations, although a lot of them were confused whether or not to write things down that would appear in the exam later. I forgot to bring up my usual warnings about not leaning on the eyepiece, tripping on the stand or announcing if the object we were targeting had moved out of view, but otherwise the session went smoothly.

I did tell them that the brothers in their community at the top floor across from the football field had been known to call the discipline officers on noisy groups, but that hasn’t happened since 1997. “Don’t break the record!” I said to them.

I had skimmed through the stories behind the constellations because Jupiter and Mercury are in the extreme west right now, visible only for an hour or so after sunset. We caught both planets. All the Galilean moons of Jupiter were visible although Mercury looked like a tiny fireball it was so close to the horizon.

Afterwards I showed the red super giant Antares as a counterpoint to the non-twinkling planets, and white Arcturus to compare with the red star. I saw multiple star-system Alpha Centauri just reaching its peak above the administration building, but some clouds obscured it, as we were about to view it.

I was surprised that I got the most reaction with the demonstration of the magnification of the telescope, centering on a far but familiar object just barely visible with the naked eye as a point of light. One student even captured the image of the distant building with their celphone camera. I hope I get a copy of that.

And to assuage their suspicions that I was just showing them pictures, we looked in on a class going on in the administration building, and they could read the writing on the board.