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

On Saturday night, after I had been informed of the unfortunate incident involving the students from Zobel*, my colleague Dayan asked me to accompany her on the stargazing of her astronomy class.

*Strangely enough, I have yet to find or receive an official announcement about this, despite the fact that a lot of the students already know. Their school’s website appears to be down today, when there was no update when I checked it yesterday. The closest thing to a confirmed statement I got was when the priest celebrating mass yesterday asked for prayers for the student who died, and for his classmates who were hospitalized.

I personally have never scheduled a Saturday night stargazing session in campus to regular students – visitors, yes. I thought that the students would frown on any activity that would cut into their weekend gimmick plans. According to Dayan though, it seems most (if not all) of her students showed up eventually.

We printed around ten star maps before leaving the department.

There were less than a dozen students that met us in the catwalk in front of the Science building, where Dayan told them to meet her at 7pm.

From there we went to the top of the Engineering building, where the observatory was.

One of the students in the group already took astronomy under me several terms ago, and was just accompanying her boyfriend, who was taking the subject under Dayan this term. She distinguished herself from her classmates because she is part of the soccer team and more than once had to ask for a special exam, all of which she got high scores in.

Before she found out that I was available, she had just planned to bring her laptop to the roof deck and try to identify the constellations from the star map software there, starting from the highly recognizable Orion.

She even told me not to bring out the telescope unless there were any planets visible. Despite the clouds near the Eastern and Western horizons, the moon and Venus were visible in the West, and Saturn in the East, when we got to the roofdeck.

Unfortunately, the clouds obscured them by the time I had set up the telescope less than ten minutes later. We spent the next few minutes demonstrating the magnification of the telescope looking at familiar landmarks across the metropolis, until Saturn became visible through a break in the clouds.

From then on nearby Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Auriga, Canis Major and Minor, as well as Mars appeared in the increasingly clearing sky, and the 20+ students (more than half of which arrived after we had gone up) were able to view them.

At strictly 8pm though, they started trickling out. I knew they had other plans for the rest of the evening, and Dayan just admonished them to be careful, especially in light of the recent accident.

But I thought if they were lucky enough for the sky to clear while they waited, they’re lucky enough to survive the rest of the weekend.