Showed my 7 year old neighbor Saturn and he went quiet for a full minute

Last Friday we finally had clear skies after a week of clouds, so I set up my 8 inch dob in the driveway. Tommy from two doors down wandered over and asked if he could look. He's usually nonstop chatter, but after I got Saturn centered and told him to look, he just stood there silent. Then he pulled back and said "that's actually real, isn't it" and that moment made all the fiddling with collimation worth it. Has anyone else had a kid just get blown away like that, or was mine just weirdly into space stuff?

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jessica_miller1d ago

Actually I kind of see it in the opposite light. That moment where Tommy went quiet, that wasn't about the planet itself. It was about him realizing that everything he's been told about space, all those cartoons and picture books, they're not just stories. The kid wasn't blown away by Saturn, he was blown away by the fact that the sky is a real place you can look into. Which is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it's also a little sad if you think about it. Kids these days spend so much time with screens that the actual night sky is basically a foreign country to them. I'm not saying your moment wasn't special, because it clearly was. I'm just saying that quiet minute probably says more about how disconnected we've let kids get from the real world than it does about their love of astronomy.