Violet put her Astronomy notebook aside and began to set up her telescope, trying not to drop it as she fiddled with the wobbly stand. Finally she had the last screw tightened and the scope pointed out of the window, and she walked around to the eyepiece and peered through it. Everything was blurry. She fumbled for the adjustment knob and began to rotate it--even more fuzzy! Wrong way, apparently. She rotated it in the other direction, and for a brief moment saw a star pop into view, then immediately become blurry again. Drat, she had turned it too far! More slowly this time, she carefully rotated the knob back the way it had come and gradually brought the night sky into focus.

Hundreds, no thousands of tiny points of light in the sky--but which one was Mercury? How could you tell a planet from a star, anyway? She slowly turned the telescope back and forth on its stand, searching for the tiny planet (why couldn't we be looking for one of the bigger ones, anyway?!)