Letter Home 15-Oct
Hey Lottie, Mum and Dad!
Astronomy classes have been AMAZING this year so far! We have now seen a bunch of constellations and planets (like Saturn, which looks AMAZING through a magical telescope), like normal, but also several muggle satellites. But that’s not all!
We got to watch several meteor showers! It’s amazing how much more we can see through a telescope, but a MAGICAL telescope makes it even more amazing! Did you know that there are these magical bird like creatures out in space that fly with space debris? My professor told me that most wixen call the Space Phoenixes, but really they’re not phoenixes at all. They’re called Arcturas - because they were first discovered flying around meteors that, from Earth’s perspective, were near the star Arcturus. Through the magical telescope, we can see that they’re beautiful creatures that come in colors of blues and reds and purples. It’s hard to tell, because unlike muggles, widen have not yet done space exploration, what exactly they are. (Well that’s partially true. Apparently there are wixen involved in muggle space exploration BUT they’ve not yet found a way to explore magical space without alerting the muggles and it’s all too new a field.) However, the Arcturas are probably not actually birds. No one knows much about them except where to spot them and when (near sunset!) and what they look like.
But that’s not all!
We also got to see a beautiful comet last night! Its tail is sooo long! The muggles call it Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, but the wixen name for it is the Taforalt Comet because an ancient wizard in Taforalt Morocco is reported to have used bead art to record his sighting of the comet. (Modern Wixen are immersed in Muggle Astronomy and Archaeology programs. However Wixen Archaeology is more known and better recorded from that far back in time. Not by much, but by enough. I wonder if wixen archaeologists give muggle archaeologists little nudges here and there…)
The comet was also more exciting to see through the magical telescope. The colors of the dust tail are indescribable! I want to say they were yellow and orange and pink, but the colors were much more pale than any shades of color I can imagine I’ve ever seen on earth and truly, the colors of yellow, orange and pink don’t feel quite “right.”
Finally we got to observe the sun through muggle technology (you guys can find it on the internet, but our professor brought out a weird magical device that allowed us to see images of the sun from Muggle organisations like NASA) so we could predict when we could see the Aurora Borealis. We got to see THAT on October 10th! We didn’t even need our telescopes to see the lights! The whole sky lit up in colors of blues and reds and greens! It was amazing! We did look through our telescopes when it wasn’t as easy to see with our naked eyes, however, and looking at the lights that way was pretty cool too. Truthfully the magical telescopes were too powerful for the northern lights, though. They’re designed to see beyond the atmosphere, but the Aurora is something in the thermosphere, which is part of Earth’s atmosphere.
Still, we saw so many exciting things and apparently our next big exciting night sky event will be the full moon on Thursday. For that event, however, those of us who went on the camping trip last summer will be spending it foraging for potion’s ingredients that must be harvested under a full moon. Our professor is sending us with smaller magical telescopes though so that we can take a few moments to observe the moon. She told us that since the moon will be so close to Earth (muggles call this a super moon), we might be able to see some magical creatures that live on the moon. Our assignment is to record if we see any and then to find out what it is. If we don’t see any, we get to research in the library and find one magical moon creature to research. Then we have to create a report on the creature to share at our next Astronomy Class, which will be a day time class. (We have one of those a month this year.)
I hope you guys got to see some of the wonders in the night sky this month! Write back soon.
Love, Ava