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.
The new uniform: navy blue jackets, white shirts. I said to the club: you look like little astronomers of the Pulkovo Observatory. They asked what Pulkovo is, and now they know.
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.
