Kyzyl-Adyr sky

Tonight at 19:41 the International Space Station passed over Kyzyl-Adyr from the south-west to the north-east, brighter than Venus, in about four minutes. I got the timetable from the Internet at the Attelkom club in the bazaar for 3 som an hour, and wrote the minutes on the blackboard in the morning. Twenty-two children came to the roof, in their school clothes, many without coats.

"It's a house in the sky," Emil said. (Aidana's little brother, 7th class.) "Six people live in it and don't pay rent."

Forty years ago, a man stepped on the Moon. I put the film on the school projector for the club: black and white, the voice crackling. They watched, and then went out and looked up, all together. There was no Moon in the sky that night, only the place where it would be. It was a clean sky and a very quiet one.

A boy from the 6th class asked: "Did they take a telescope?" I said no. "Then how did they see the stars?" I said I didn't know. He frowned for a long time.

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.

Lulin: the pale smudge near the centre of the photo.

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.

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.