How X learns - wednesday

I got out of the car tonight, to a clear sky (finally!).  In fact, I couldn't wait to go home and take the time to look up with X.  But before coming home, I took the time to admire the sky all by myself.  I guess X's interest in the sky doesn't come from anywhere, mom's always had it too.

It didn't take me long to finally spot the moon, and just as he predicted, the moon was half full to the left.  I just smiled.  But X saw me arrive through the window, and by the time I was heading for the door, he was out.  I told him to go and shut the lights of the house, and we just looked at the sky.

And then he saw them.  All the stars.  The way he had seen in his book.  He just saw them differently, I  could tell, because it is not the first time that we look up to the sky.  I was able to show him ursa minor (la petite ourse) that was just starting to be visible to the line of the horizon. Ursa minor in french is called (litterally) the small bear. That was all I needed to say to generate an infinite amount of questions... (Bear?? what do you mean bear?  There is a bear in the sky...)

We took a little bit of time, I took out my sky map, and we were able to spot a few of the wintery constellations that we see in our skies.  He had a hard time figuring out how to see the "drawings" that constellations make in the sky (don't we all?).

So we got in, and went browsing on my pc on a program called Stellarium
This program is free and fantastic to learn anything about the sky

we entered our own location, and looked up at the sky, just as we had seen it minutes ago outside. He was just fascinated to see the drawing of the constellations in the sky, the ones he couldn't imagine, I had to tear him up from my pc to go and have dinner.

And back to the book we are, now onto the chapter of constellations...