Observation 2.1

I'm so excited to report about the Stargazing session last night on October 29th. It was definitely the best session I've ever had, whether by myself or a class one. We saw so many satellites (I counted 10 or 11 throughout the night), including the International Space Station! I had never seen the ISS before and Emma and I located it when it was coming into sight from the north and everyone followed it until it was covered by the Earth's shadow in the South. It was almost as bright as Venus.
We determined that the sky in the parking lot was 5th magnitude by looking at the stars in the constellation Cygnus. We observed through the telescope Venus in its quarter phase, M11, M16, M57, M27, and Polaris and its close neighboring star.
We also saw the only celestial object in the night sky that is not in our galaxy and is visible with the naked eye, the Andromeda galaxy. That is over 2 MILLION LIGHT YEARS away, and we could see it without a telescope. Mind-blowing.
The kids sitting near me and I also saw a couple meteors (!!!); I believe four were spotted but I only saw two of them. We also discovered this peculiar blinking light about seven or eight degrees to the left of Delphinus. It moved very slowly and blinked about once every 10 seconds, and we could not figure out what it was. We reported our observation to Mr. Percival, and he said that it was most likely some kind of high altitude weather balloon. Interesting.
As Mr. Percival said, you will only ever see these things by looking up! So I will definitely keep looking up. Astronomy never ceases to amaze me.