Moon new. No cloud. Seventy-one in an hour, counted by my grandson with a clicker from the football match. Four fireballs. At the end the whole field fell silent and a girl of nine said, "Is that all?"
"For this year," I said. "There's always the next one."
In Spain they had an eclipse of the Sun this week, which we did not see. We have seen others.
Tonight, a total lunar eclipse again: the Moon turned slowly copper over the eastern ridge and stayed so for about eighty minutes. Fifteen children from the club, seven parents and Altynai, the young teacher who took over physics. She runs the club now, and I come with a thermos.
I am tired and I am happy. This is how a teacher should end.
Last night I was washing dishes and my wife called me from the porch: "Almazbek, the sky is on fire." Low in the north, a pink and red glow, big as a mountain, with pale rays going up. It lasted half an hour. I thought: it must be a fire in a village, but there was none. Then the internet said: aurora, from a huge solar storm. At our latitude! I have been looking at the sky for sixty years and I had never seen one.
My former pupils sent seventeen photos on Tulpar in the night, all from different villages. In every one the red glow is in the north.
First time I watch the Perseids from a garden chair instead of the school roof. My wife brought a blanket. The sky was very good: no Moon until near dawn, forty an hour. My grandson is eight and he counted all of them, aloud, in two languages.
Retirement. It is not bad.
Yesterday Jupiter and Saturn were so close that they looked like one star, low in the south-west after sunset. The telescope showed both in the same field of view: the big banded Jupiter and its four moons, and the small ringed Saturn beside it. The last time they were this close was 1623, the year before Galileo died. (I checked: he died in 1642. This is the sort of mistake one makes when excited.)
Eight children on the roof, with masks, in a line, each waiting a turn. Just like the old days, only with masks.
The comet of the year. Low in the north-west after sunset, with a long tail like a brush stroke. I took my wife, my grandson and the dog up to the school roof (the key still works). The comet hung under the Plough, fuzzy and calm, with a tail that was easy to see in binoculars.
No quarantine would stop me. I wore the mask on the stairs and took it off on the roof.
A week ago something strange: a line of thirty or more small bright lights, one behind the other, travelling slowly across the sky like beads on a thread. Half of the parents called me. Several said they had written to Tulpar chat and the chat said it was a UFO.
I looked it up: a new American company launched many satellites at once and they travel in a train for a few days. Not UFOs, just a very long advertisement. The children were disappointed. I told them: this is also the sky now.
The longest lunar eclipse of the century. The whole valley was in bed, and the club, thirty-one of them with parents, was on the football field behind the school at one in the morning. The Moon red and low in the south-east, and below it, bright and orange, was Mars, closest to us since 2003. A red Moon and a red planet, side by side.
A mother from the village brought samsa at 2 a.m. in a basket. This is the proper way to watch an eclipse.
Yesterday the shadow of the Moon crossed America from one ocean to the other. We saw it on the internet at the school, with the sound turned off. Natalia's cousin in Oregon sent her photographs, and she brought them to the club. In one the whole sky has gone dark at midday, and there are people standing in a field with their arms up.
Natalia asked: "Will we have one?" I said not for a long time; I looked it up, and I will not be here for the next one over our valley. Perhaps she will.
Yesterday a partial eclipse of the Sun, a small one for us, about a fifth. The children, who have seen better, were not very excited. But a new boy of the 5th class, who had never seen an eclipse, looked through the filter, went silent, and later said that it looked like a coin.
I do not mind a small bite. Somebody sees it first.
The biggest Full Moon of the year rose over the ridge at sunset, orange and round. It's not "that" much bigger, I tell the children, only a bit, but it feels big. I stood at the school gate with a bag of apricots and watched them walk home looking up.
The Perseids were poor: the Moon was too bright. I counted eight. The honest number.
The comet that was going to be the "comet of the century" came close to the Sun on Thursday and fell apart. We had been waiting since the spring. Pupils asked if the sky had lied to us. I said: no. The sky does not lie, it only does not promise. A comet is a heap of ice and dust, and it is allowed to die.
A good lesson, in the end. Better than a bright comet, maybe.
Yesterday a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk; thousands of windows broke. In school today every child asked me: could it come here? I said yes, it could, but the chance is very small, and we are watching the sky anyway. They wrote questions on the blackboard. The first one: "What if it came during the exam?"
I explained the difference between a meteor and a meteorite. I explained again.
A rare day: the planet Venus walked across the face of the Sun, a small dark dot, from before our sunrise until about eleven. It will not happen again for 105 years. The club met on the school yard at 5:30 in the morning with the welded-glass filters. At 6:10 the Sun came up over the hill with a small black ball on its edge, and a boy of the 5th class said "it's a seed."
I took the whole school out, including the headmaster and the cook. The cook liked it the most. She asked if Venus does this on purpose.
Tonight, in the small hours, a total lunar eclipse over the Tian Shan, one of the longest for years. The Moon hung low over the southern ridge, dark copper, and came out gradually, from rust to silver. Because it was low, it looked huge, with the apricot trees of Mukhtar-aga's garden in front of it. I took twelve pictures and eleven were bad.
A faint green comet, just visible in Leo near the planet Saturn. You need dark skies and binoculars, and this winter we have dark skies, God knows. Twelve children on the roof in blankets, and one old pair of binoculars passed from hand to hand like a bowl of tea.
Minus twenty, no light in the valley between five and midnight, and the sky is a different place. The Milky Way goes over our roof like a road in snow. On a night like this the club counted seven satellites in one hour and a faint, quick glow that we think was a flare from an Iridium. I have not seen so many stars since I was a student, on a field trip in 1982.
The headmaster has allowed the club to use the gym for a "warm station": a stove and a kettle, between the roof and the ladder, so the children do not freeze.
I know what this winter means for the people. I am an old schoolteacher. I carry both things.
Today the Moon covered the Sun again: total in Siberia and Mongolia, not for us. Less than half covered at our place, in the late afternoon, so we saw a low yellow Sun with a dent in it above the mountains. A truck driver stopped on the highway and asked whether it was the end of the world. We said no, offered him tea, and he stayed for twenty minutes.
Three days ago, on 24 October, a small faint comet called Holmes suddenly became a million times brighter in a few hours. Tonight it is a round golden ball in the constellation Perseus, brighter than almost any star. You can see it with your naked eye from the school yard.
The children cannot believe it is a comet, because it has no tail. It is a ball of gas that grows bigger every night (the gas, not the nucleus!). I told them that the sky does not always do what the books say.
I promised. The Moon was new, the night was black, and at night this year the whole valley is dark, with only a few lamps, because everyone is careful with light. It was the best Perseid night I have seen: about eighty an hour, some of them as bright as Venus, one that left a trail we could still see after four seconds.
We lay on the roof of my house, six of us, wrapped in blankets. Once we heard the guns, very far. Then only the crickets. Then another meteor.
I am not telling this because the sky does not care. I am telling it because it does.
Tonight, from about three in the morning until near dawn, the Moon went through the shadow of the Earth. A total eclipse: the full Moon, then a dark bite, then copper red all over. I woke the club at half past two by telephone, and eleven came to the school in the dark, with blankets. Two were new in our town: their family came in February from the side of Aulie-Ata. They sat very close to the older children and did not say anything for an hour. At the red Moon one of them said, quietly, "It is the same Moon." I said yes. It is.
The best shower of the year, and this time the sky was clear and the Moon almost gone. Minus nine. The club on the roof in felt boots and chapans, with thermoses of tea that the mothers sent. We counted sixty-three in one hour. A girl from the 8th class kept the tally in her exercise book with a pencil and her hands in woollen gloves with the fingertips cut off.
At the end the headmaster came up the ladder in his good coat to see what we were shouting about, and stayed an hour.
The Perseids are every year around 12 August. This year the Moon, three days after full, was lighting the whole yard like a lamp. We saw about eleven in two hours, instead of sixty or more. The best one was a long yellow one that went right across Cassiopeia. Everybody said "oh" at the same time, like in a cinema.
Next year is better. The Moon will be new. I promise this like a weather forecast, so I could be wrong, but astronomy forecasts are good.
June is bad for us. The sun goes down at nine, and real dark comes at eleven, and the children's mothers want them at home. So we meet at the school at 21:30 and look at Jupiter before midnight. Even with the little telescope you can see the four moons in a line.
Galileo saw them in 1610 and understood that the Earth is not the centre. It cost him a lot. I tell the children: you see it from the roof for free.
On 29 March the Moon covered the Sun. In Turkey and Libya the day turned to night. We are far to the east of the line, so we had only a bite: a little more than half of the Sun covered, at about noon.
The club made pinhole viewers from cereal boxes and welded-glass filters from the workshop. Forty children stood in the yard with their backs to the Sun and looked at a small white square on the ground. The square had a bite in it, getting bigger, then smaller. Not one of them said "boring". Then a cloud came. We cheered anyway.
