Seeing Jupiter for the First Time

Lucy insisted we go outside the other night to look for shooting stars.  Although I didn't want to - it was cold and I was tired - after a few minutes of pointing out the few things I knew to her (the rest I made up) I decided to get out the telescope Isabella won when she got second place in a school science fair years ago.  After a lot of jiggling to find the right lens and focus it just right, I found Jupiter, and we both spent twenty minutes or so looking at it, trying to hallucinate bands, definitely seeing its 4 moons.   When I was a kid, I remember the first time I saw the planets through my Sears Best telescope and what an awesome experience it is to realize you are looking across such unfathomable distances at something so unfathomably large in real time.  It is a completely different experience than seeing it in a book, as different as spotting a dolphin in the ocean yourself versus seeing a picture of one in National Geographic.  I am glad Lucy had that experience.
Before she went to bed, she insisted I read her something about Jupiter and the next day it must have impressed her so much that she drew a picture of the planet and its moons and the swirling, never-ending storms on its surface with lightning 1,000 times as powerful as that on Earth. 

Lucy's careful schematic of a shooting star which she claims to have seen (unconfirmed, but so what?) as well as Jupiter ("Jepdr") which she knew from school was the largest planet in our system.   She drew a clock like a good scientist to indicate what time she looked at the planet, and drew the moons she saw when she looked through the telescope.   She even drew a compass to indicate North (we were actually looking South but I had just shown her the Northern sky with the Big Dipper and the North Star earlier, so she got them a little mixed up - that's OK!).

 "Jupiter has storms all the time" - yes it does!  I don't think she was trying to anthropomorphize the planet - this was her rendition of the red dot she saw in a photo (unfortunately, my telescope does not have that sort of resolution!).

 This sort of innocent wonder and capacity to be amazed should never be killed in school and I am so grateful that at least for now it hasn't been, only fostered.