Hi Stephanie,

I used to have a telescope back when I was in high school. Mostly, I used it to look at the planets, like Saturn and Jupiter. Saturn is fun to look at through a small telescope because you can see the rings. You can also see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, as well as the Galilean moons of Jupiter through a small telescope. Jupiter's larger, Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), are fun to watch because you can see them change positions from night to night as they orbit around the planet. We call Jupiter's four largest moons, the "Galilean" moons because they were discovered by Galileo in about 1610. This was the first time it was recognized that there celestial objects orbiting around something other than the Earth. It was a very important discovery, because during Galileo's lifetime many people believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system, not the Sun.

Kris

One of my favorite suggestions for parents of middle-Elementary school (to middle school) students for gifts to their child is a pair of binoculars. In addition to being great at baseball games and family trips, there's a lot of the night sky which is great to see through binoculars, and they're easy for kids to operate. And, like I demonstrated to kids at my son's class today, they're easy to hold for projecting an image of the Sun onto a piece of paper to look for sunspots.

Cheers, -KD