The last of the Orionids tonight, but a lot of cloud and a cold wind. We stood on the roof for an hour and counted three. Altynai brought hot tea, and the children brought each other their own news: who has a new phone, who has a new brother, who is leaving for Talas to study.
I am sixty-five. The telescope still wobbles. I am not going to fix it.
A quiet autumn. In October people in the town were careful, as everywhere. I will not write about it here. The club met every Friday as usual. The children looked up and the sky was clear.
The telescope has a new tripod, from the parents' committee.
The school is closed. We have lessons on Tulpar. I teach the 10th class from my kitchen, with my wife passing behind the camera with the laundry. The club is not allowed to meet, so every Friday I send an exercise: "go outside for fifteen minutes, find the Moon, draw it." Thirty-four drawings came back last week.
A nine-year-old drew the Moon with a face, then a very sad face, then a mask.
The power goes at five in the evening now, and comes back, or not, at midnight. The children do homework with candles. Mothers are worried about the cold; I am worried about the same, and in the second place I am worried that it is the first time in my life that the school roof is truly dark.
I will not say it is good. It is cold, and the people are tired. But I will say that Orion is hanging over the valley as it must have hung in the days of the Kokand khans.
No posts since 2 June. I won't say why. The telescope is all right: it spent the month in my cellar, wrapped in a blanket. So am I.
New year in the club: nineteen children, of whom seven are girls (record!). We started with the simplest thing: lie on your back in the yard for ten minutes without talking. After ten minutes everybody sees more stars than they had seen in all their life before.
Then I ask them to point at Polaris. Fourteen point at the wrong star. I send them home with the homework: find the Plough, follow it to the north.
The pupils told me that Kündölük has colour schemes, and that one of them is dark. So I chose "Tün", the night. It is correct for a person who writes about the sky.
Here I will put what we see from the school roof, when we see it, and what we do not see because of clouds, which is usually more.