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.
Today is the last bell for the 12th class, and for me. I am sixty, I have taught here for thirty-five years, and from September someone younger will teach physics. She is a good girl, a TSU graduate, and she has already asked about the roof.
I will keep the club and the telescope. The headmaster agreed. The pupils gave me a card signed by all of them with a drawing of Saturn that looks like a hat.
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.
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.