Observatory

The whole afternoon we went ice-skating, then we saw some stars and the moon at the sky. My Swiss friend and I thought we can try it today to go to the observatory and maybe we can see different stars. When we arrived the observatory, we thought it is closed, because we came from the wrong side. When we found it, we went inside, and we saw the big telescope. The man inside can’t speak English, so we just saw the moon through the telescope. And I have to say it looks incredible. After we saw the moon, we went to a room in the observatory to get e little bit warm, because we were freezing. Inside of this room we met an old Finnish guy and he said something in Finnish to us. Then we talked with him and explained that we are from Switzerland and we are trying to learn Finnish, but it is bad now. He asked us, why we go to an observatory and if we are interested in the astronomy. We told him that we are doing it for the university to get to know different places and habits from Finnish people. Then he asked us a lot of different questions about the astronomy and we had no idea about it. He went outside with us and showed us the different stars and situations on the sky. Sirius is the biggest and the shiniest star, but we can’t see it, it was behind a building. He explained us the Orion and in the “belt” of this combination you can go a little bit down in the same line and you will find the Sirius. Also, we found the big bear on the sky and then if you take the distance of the two highest stars in the big bear and you go on the right side five times you can find the polar star. You can be geared to the Polar star and you can locate your country in the world and analyze the degree of latitude. The Polar star is directly over the north pole and you can appoint the cardinal points if you see the Polar star. We saw the moon as well and next to it the shiny Venus. He explained us that yesterday the moon and the Venus were at the same place and today it was far away from each other. We recognized that the moon is moving fast. It was an interesting and cold evening and fortunately we met this Finnish man and he was not as shy as other Finnish people.