Night Shining

Saskatchewan has some truly awe-inspiring skies. This summer my goal is to have my kids and I learn a little bit about the clouds. Mostly because I’m a boring Mom and I think we all need to keep learning during the summer.

There were some oddly spectacular skies the other night and I thought… “Why not start there?” What a fascinating idea.

Noctilucent clouds are primarily visible when the sun is just below the horizon either just after sunset or before sunrise. Wikipedia tell us that Noctilucent (roughly means night shining in Latin) clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. They consist of ice crystals and are only visible during astronomical twilight. They are most often observed during the summer months. Too faint to be seen in the daylight, they are visible only when the observer and the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth’s shadow, but while these very high clouds are still in sunlight.

Anyway. It’s the end of June and with the summer months here I find myself wondering how else I can spend some good quality time with the kids while learning and having fun at the same time. I don’t remember my parents doing anything to entertain us kids while I was growing up. We would go camping for 2 weeks in the summer and then on the weekends but that was the extent of it. The highlight of every summer that I can remember is the school supply shopping that always took place while we were out camping. We would head in to the little town about 20 mins away from the lake and shop all the great sales LOL. We usually stayed at Little Loon. We always spent some time at Grieg Lake and Kimball Lake as well since we had family that owned cabins there. We would pick out a site that was always seemed to be the furthest away from them (and the beach) and would have to carry all of our stuff for what seemed like miles!

What are your plans for the summer? Do you have a favorite summertime childhood memory?

-Ang