per aspera ad astra

Thursday night I saw the rings on Saturn and the craters on the moon. It was extraordinary. It's one thing to see it in pictures and another thing completely to look through the telescope and see those rings for yourself. The moon really does look like swiss cheese.

Slottskrogen is the big park in Göteborg. It's like High Park in Toronto - walking paths, playgrounds, mini zoo, picnic spaces. But Slottskrogen also has an observatory, which is where we met Andrew's teacher, Susan, for an astronomy field trip Thursday night. 9:30-10:30pm might sound like an odd time to have a school trip, but any earlier and it wouldn't have been dark enough to see anything. Susan taught us about variable stars - have you noticed that sometimes a star looks brighter for a few days, then the same star looks dimmer? Maybe there are 2 of them circling around each other, taking turns being seen by Earth. We saw the double star in the Big Dipper. You can see it with the naked eye if you concentrate - 2nd one in from the end of the handle - but there are actually more than 2. I saw 3 through the telescope, but I think I was supposed to see more. We focussed on the Pleiades and the nebula in Orion's belt. So much to see - such powerful telescopes.

In case you were wondering, per aspera ad astra means "through hardships to the stars". A rather fitting summary of our year.