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.
For people who ask what we use: a refractor, 80 mm aperture, focal length 900, 1978. It shows the four moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn (small, but rings), the craters of the Moon, and a very good Pleiades. Nothing else we need.
The mount wobbles, so when the wind blows we hold it with our hands, two children on each leg. The Moon through this telescope is a face in a mirror. Last week a pupil of the 7th class said "ah!" and took a step back, and nobody laughed.
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.
The pupils told me that Kündölük has colour schemes, and that one of them is dark. So I chose "Tün", the night. It is correct for a person who writes about the sky.
Here I will put what we see from the school roof, when we see it, and what we do not see because of clouds, which is usually more.