Kyzyl-Adyr sky

Our last club meeting before the summer: Saturn small and yellow in the west after sunset, a thin Moon near it, nineteen children on the roof and a cold wind. I gave each of them the same homework for the holidays: lie on your back one night a week and look. I promise the Perseids in August, with a new Moon. The best night of the year.

They said goodbye in the yard in the usual way, by pushing each other.

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 Moon in the shadow. A phone camera does not like it; this is from a compact camera of my neighbour.

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.

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 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.