I think this is all great fun partly because I was interested in this stuff as a little kid, reading books from the Sixties and Seventies written back before most of this great information was even available, illustrated with speculative paintings. Then I actually got to watch the "new solar system" take shape before my eyes as the great age of unmanned planetary exploration went on.
Space buffs who remember more of the Sixties Space Race sometimes have a disparaging attitude toward robot probes--that they don't provide the romance of heroes walking on alien soil--but I never quite had that feeling. My formative elementary-school years coincided with something of a hiatus in manned space exploration, during the mid- to late Seventies. I was deeply interested in Apollo and the Shuttle, but Viking and Voyager were the missions that were actually going on at the time, and they were opening the book on all these spectacular new worlds.
Since Jorie watches me look at Cassini and other stuff on the web, she's become interested in the pictures and we actually have a couple of astronomy books we got just for her. She knows that the Moon is in the sky, but otherwise I think these are just interesting arbitrary objects to her, another category aside from geometric shapes, numbers, letters and farm animals. But at less than a year and a half, she can identify several planets, the Galilean moons of Jupiter and a few of Saturn's by sight (she refers to all small irregular bodies as "Hyperion", but that's doing pretty well), and sometimes I amaze myself by remembering that when I was a little kid nobody even knew what they looked like.
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Date: 2008-01-12 04:46 pm (UTC)I think this is all great fun partly because I was interested in this stuff as a little kid, reading books from the Sixties and Seventies written back before most of this great information was even available, illustrated with speculative paintings. Then I actually got to watch the "new solar system" take shape before my eyes as the great age of unmanned planetary exploration went on.
Space buffs who remember more of the Sixties Space Race sometimes have a disparaging attitude toward robot probes--that they don't provide the romance of heroes walking on alien soil--but I never quite had that feeling. My formative elementary-school years coincided with something of a hiatus in manned space exploration, during the mid- to late Seventies. I was deeply interested in Apollo and the Shuttle, but Viking and Voyager were the missions that were actually going on at the time, and they were opening the book on all these spectacular new worlds.
Since Jorie watches me look at Cassini and other stuff on the web, she's become interested in the pictures and we actually have a couple of astronomy books we got just for her. She knows that the Moon is in the sky, but otherwise I think these are just interesting arbitrary objects to her, another category aside from geometric shapes, numbers, letters and farm animals. But at less than a year and a half, she can identify several planets, the Galilean moons of Jupiter and a few of Saturn's by sight (she refers to all small irregular bodies as "Hyperion", but that's doing pretty well), and sometimes I amaze myself by remembering that when I was a little kid nobody even knew what they looked like.