Stars in the Night Sky

 When I was a little girl I had many adventures and one of the adventures that I had was watching the stars at night. I remember laying down on the floor with my brother, Isidro. We watched the sky and tried to count the stars during night but it was an impossible mission. We could see thousands of stars or even millions filling the sky. I remember each night the stars were different. They had that brilliant white color and some of the stars were not that brilliant. I even watched something falling from the sky. My father told me that stars die and fall, and that was the light that we saw coming to the earth. He said every time we see a star fall down we can ask for one wish.

My brother and I enjoyed playing at night with the sky. We could see designs in the sky, like faces, and we believe that maybe angels were watching over the earth. Where I come from is a small town close to the mountains. I remember when my family would come over to visit; since we could not fit inside the house, we slept outside, sometimes on the front porch and sometimes on the top of the house. Since, in Mexico, the houses are different, the roof of the houses are straight like a sheet made out of concrete. I enjoyed the night back then because the world was not as dangerous as it is today. I remember sleeping outside under the sky without a worry in the world. I remember feeling that joy to be outside and close to the sky.

Now that I’m an adult and live in a different country, I wonder what the sky at night looks like, and since I have a little girl that is eleven years old, she is as adventurous as me. She likes to run and play outside and enjoy the nature. We decided to purchase a telescope to watch the moon. My daughter and my son were so excited to see the moon. I was surprised with the first impression of how the moon looks under the eye of the telescope. It was like a piece of rock but perfect with craters all over. I saw the starts and the moon when I was little but not that close. We tried to see the starts but we only could see a bright light.

Since this project is to watch the sky, I watched the sky during spring break almost every day and I noticed that there are not that many stars in the sky and I can even count them. My first day when I was at the park around 7:00 p. m., I saw the sky which was very light blue, almost white in color but with a blue tone. I saw white clouds around the sky. Then by 7:30 p.m. I only could see one tiny little star that wasn’t that brilliant, and then by 8:00 p.m. the sky was a beautiful shade of dark blue, like in the movies where they show the blue of the ocean. But still I only could see couple stars appear during the night. By 8:30 the color of the sky changed from that beautiful color to just a dark color, and the only light I saw was the light that the park uses for illumination. Then I kept looking at the sky for couple of days in the back yard of my house and I noticed the same stars appeared. I counted them, and there were seventeen stars. I kept watching them change positions but there were the same number of stars.

In the park I saw less stars than in my back yard. The last day I saw only a couple of stars from my back yard. I don’t know if it was because it looked like it was going to rain, but it was strange that they disappeared. I did not put that much emphasis into the sky when I was a child, but I noticed a big difference back then, the sky was full of stars, and I couldn't even count them. Now I can even tell  how many stars are in the sky, and I came up with questions that I could not answer. Is the sky different because when I was little I lived in a different country or because the stars are mysteriously disappearing from the sky?