Telescope time! Finally, the moment Rory was waiting for. He reached for his bag, opened it up and whipped out his telescope. He followed the other students to the window and enthusiastically propped his telescope near a window, aiming it at the night sky. The task was to find Mercury but how exactly do you find a planet and how would you know if it's the correct planet? That was the one thing Rory never understood. But then again, Rory felt as if Mercury might look like a blue planet, except for the fact that it was so close to the Sun...oh, whatever. It's a blue planet!

Rory set up his right eye against the little eye-hole thingy and began exploring the stars and the planets. Which one was Mercury, though? At one point, he saw a slightly reddish color but that was probably a different planet. Blue...blue...something blue...

"Come on, Mercury. Where are you?" he said to himself as he scanned the dark sky. "Perhaps I should adjust the lens..." And so Rory twisted the front of the telescope a few times, keeping his eye on the eye-piece, checking to see if anything looked clearer. He had done this so many times at home before school started that he wasn't surprised that everything looked out of whack. "Perfect!" Now, he could see clearly and he continued his long search for Mercury. "Blue...Mr. Blue Mercury..." Rory kept looking, and looking, and looking, until...

"I FOUND IT! IT'S BIG AND BLUE--well, it's small--BUT IT'S BLUISH AND WEIRD AND AWESOME." Yes, very awesome, indeed. Just not as awesome as Rory himself. Of course, a part of him had hoped it was some random light in the sky that had nothing to do with planets. It was blue, wasn't it? At least, slightly blue?

Maybelle took out her telescope. She set it up, and before she knew it...well, she saw nothing. What did Mercury even look like? Where was it in the sky? Grr...Maybelle could only see a few stars...and even that wasn't close to Mercury. She raised her hand. "Sir, I can't find anything...all I see is a bunch of stars." She stated. Where in Merlin's beard was Mercury!?

Minerva went and got her telescope from the cabinet. She set it up and started looking into the night sky. It was so pretty to see all the stars. Now Mercury.. hmmm Where would I find it. Well if the sun comes up on the east I should be looking eat. Minerva thought to herself. She pointed her telescope in the right direction, but couldn't see anything. She looked around to see if other students were being successful.

Find Mercury? she asked herself. She grabbed her bag, went to an empty spot in front of the windows and started assembling her telescope. The breeze felt wonderful at night and it was Lysandra's favorite part of the whole day. She then started to look in the sky, trying to find Mercury. All she really saw were stars. Didn't her mom tell her that the brightest and biggest stars were other planets? She started looking for them. She found one, but didn't know if it was Mercury or not. She assumed that it was.

Gideon took his telescope out when they moved on from the questions to the actual practical portion of the class. Now this was astronomy class! The fourth year moved to the window and esily set up the instrument quite used to the proceedure as he listened to what they were to be looking for. He leaned in and looked through the lens as he tried to pinpoint the location of Mercury in the night sky. After a few moments, Gideon straightened up registering something he thought he remembered about Mercury and frowning.

It was too early! Or too late depending on whether it was supposed to be right before dawn or right after sunset.Gideon looked back up at the Professor wondering if he was mistaken or if Gideon himself was seeing as people were supposedly finding it.

So Astronomy was basically stargazing? You looked through this telescope and you discovered what planets or stars you could see? Well then it couldn't be a particularly difficult subject when it came to practicals, it just depended on the theory side. Gwen could do things but she wasn't her brother, she wasn't exactly brilliant at the intellectual side.

After all the introductions the thirteen year old picked up her telescope and found an empty spot by the window she could glance out. It took her a while to work out how to open it out so that it was ready to use but she had got it eventually. The brunette used to enjoy glancing up at the stars in the nights sky when her family used to sit around the campfire at home. They had always been there, shining down on them, except for when the night was cloudy.

Peering through the telescope Gwenyth tried her hardest to find the biggest and brightest star in the sky, the one she assumed would be the great planet. But due to the amount of stars there were in the sky, finding the right one proved difficult. Assuming that the brightest star was Mercury, she pulled away from the telescope and bit her lip looking at the rest of the students.

U-uh... I don't even know how Mercury looks like, how am I supposed to even find it?, Gwendolyn thought. However, deciding it would be stupid of her to ask how to find it, the young Ravenclaw was determined to do everything herself. Without any help! I can do this myself!, she said, raising her eyes and looking at the sky.

Gulp.

The sky is full of those sparkly things- how am I supposed to actually recognize something? Scanning the sky and coming across all those small annoying stars, Gwendolyn tried not to get annoyied by the fact that she was a total disaster when it came to Astronomy. She made a short break, took a deep breath, and then continued gazing through the telescope... After several minutes, she still hadn't made any progress. Getting angry, the second year felt her face was getting red. Dark red. Almost purple...

Putting her cold hands on her cheeks, the young Ravenclaw tried to calm down. Listening to what other people where saying, she decided to take the older student's advice and look for that other thing... Planets near Mercury... let's see....

After a while Gwendolyn came across something... I FOUND IT!, she wanted to scream, but managed to control herself. Really relieved that she wasn't such a disaster after all, Gwen waited patiently for further instructions.

Alyssa quickly wrote down in her journal what the Professor had said. Then she put down her quill and pulled out her brand new brass telescope out from her bag. Bringing it closer to the window, she started focussing up in the sky. She adjusted the lenses in order to magnify the objects in the sky and first started to look for the Milky Way, which was always her first point of reference. "Once you find the Milky Way, you can find anything after that,"her great Grand-dad would tell her. "Then find the North Star. That never ever moves from it's position no matter where you are." Alyssa could hear his voice whispering in her ear.

Once she located both of them, she started searching for Mercury.

Anna pulled her telescope closer and looked into it. A little focused and turned. "Caught!" She quickly found Mercury because she loved Astronomy and already knew the starry sky and its location at this time of year.

Alyssa kept searching for Mercury. Then she remembered that Mercury was always located closest to the Sun and sits between it and the Earth. Thus Mercury was usually hidden by the Sun's glare during the day and by it's shadow during the night. Mercury also moved counter clockwise around the Sun. "Okay I know all that, but it still doesn't help me find you, Mercury," Alyssa thought to herself. "Look for the Sun, Alyssa. Mercury is always nearby. But it's night!! The Sun's not out!! Yes it is you just can't see it below the horizon!!" Alyssa found herself arguing with herself. She almost started giggling. "Concentrate, Alyssa. Find Mercury!!".

Oh yeah, that's right people, take note... Marie mentioned something no one else did. It wasn't very often something like that happened so yeah, she was gloating just a bit.

Oh crud. Now they had to try and find one of the planets? Looks like gloating time was over. It was one thing to answer something that had been read in a book, but now she had to actually try and find one of those planets, and not just any planet either... it had to be the smallest of them all now didn't it.

Going over to the cupboard she grabbed one of the telescopes from there. Why should she lug one of those things to and from class when there were some in the room they could use.

Setting the telescope up on the ledge of a vacant window she looked through it only to see nothing but blackness. Well that wasn't what she was looking for.

Adjusting the scope a little and moving it slightly to the right she found something. It was huge, white and not so bright. It was... the moon. Again, not what she was looking for.

Theodore, listening to instructions, dug his telescope from his bag and set it up on a ledge. Astronomy had never truly been his strong suit, but her tried. Things like starry nights and the zodiac interested him; it was just star-readers like centaurs that tended to scare him a wee bit.

Checking the rim of his telescope to make sure that no one had smeared black around it again (because they had before, and the results of Theo sticking his eye in the eyehole had been embarrassing), he peered through the lens. All that could be seen was tiny shining little lights: stars. Blackness enveloped the rest of the scene.

"Mercury, Mercury..." He crooned to himself, "C'mere, Mercury." A grimace ensued. Where could it be hiding?

Yea, Marilyn was having little success. Was it the right time to be looking? The Professor had said so and he would know since he WAS the Professor.

Sighing, the blonde was getting a little irritated with not finding the blasted planet. She almost wanted to stomp her foot...but refrained herself, thankfully...

Wait!

Was that it?!

It was bluish...but Marilyn couldn't e sure. Raising her hand, "Professor...I'm looking to the West...because I read somewhere that it will rise in the East before sunset. Did I find it?"

Tori grabbed a telescope and smiled at the professor as she went to set it up. Well this class wasn't as bad as she thought it would be! Tori kinda liked space junk stuff.

Now, if only her telescope would work. The redhead squinted into the eyepiece but didn't see anything. She even swung it back and forth and up and down but all she could see was pitch blackness.

Hmm.

Alyssa was getting frustrated. "How the heck do we find Mercury unless the Sun is about to rise? We can only see Mercury 30 minutes before sun rises and it will be located east of the Sun. Is the Sun about to rise?

If the sun was about to rise, Mercury would be east of where the Sun rises, and it would be low to the horizon. Alyssa pointed her telescope east towards the rising sun and found it!! Yes!! IT WAS Mercury!! Just where it should be, left of the Sun just above the horizon. Alyssa punched the air in jubilation "YES!!"

Then she realized where she was and turned around to see whether anyone had noticed her.

Jayden took her telescope out of her bag, setting it up was a reasonably easy task, considering she and her father and used a telescope before.

"Now, where is Mercury?" She muttered to herself, peering through the eye piece.

"Okay.... Moon, stars, more stars... what in Merlin's beard?" She continued muttering to herself, growing irritated and impatient.

It was stargazing tiiiiiime!

Nikolas took out his telescope and searched for an empty spot to set up the instrument. Hmmm. He walked towards a window to start the practical portion of the class when he saw umm...this redhead girl whom he met in the dungeon corridor. Her name...princess something.

The girl seemed to not understand how the telescope worked or... what was she doing? He asked himself when she started to swing the telescope back and forth. Before he could start looking for Mercury, Nikolas walked towards her and said "Got problems with it?" maybe the telescope was broken?

Ariella wasn't too fond of astronomy, and it wasn't helping that the professor was asking them to simply just look for a planet. In her opinion, astronomy, should be about stars, bodies of the universe, and extraterrestrial life. Weren't planets a bit elementary?

Sighing, she took out her telescope. The lens was covered in a thin coating of dust. She wiped it off with the bottom of her robe and wandered over to an empty window. Kurumi had said to look for another planet first, so she peeked through the lens. She saw a few brighter looking stars than others, which she assumed were planets. Ariella knew that Mercury's orbit was closer to the sun that most of the other ones, so she tried to calculate the positioning of the rest of the planets.

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?!)

And the little Slytherin said they didn't know anything about Astronomy! There she was using the star's proper names and all. "Exactly, but that will only get you so far with finding Mercury," Kurumi said with a small shake of her head. "Using it as a starting point in any search is usually very helpful though. If nothing else it gives you something to start with."

Kurumi now returned her own attention to her telescope, which curretly had something gross on it. Kurumi removed her wand from her pocket and cast a few quick cleaning spells to remove the gunk and then flicked a piece of lint off of it. She had just been looking east, with no luck, so Kurumi began looking elsewhere.

Nothing...nothing...

Kurumi nearly jumped out of her robes when she heard students shouting that they had found it and she returned her attention. WHERE were they seeing this? It was too early still, right? They couldn't possibly have been in class for six hours yet - if they had, Kurumi was pretty sure she would have fallen asleep on the floor somewhere from exhaustion.

She rubbed her eyes again, and then heard what Corey had to say. Kurumi had been wondering the same thing.

Either way, Kurumi looked through her telescope and saw that Polaris was almost directly in front of her. Well, that was rather nice of it. Made things easier. She moved her telescope downwards in the southeast direction and found Pollux, which meant only one thing: Neptune wasn't too far behind. Aha! There it was.

Kurumi grabbed her parchment and made a few notes. If nothing else, she could spot everything else she had found, right? Mercury was still very much evading her at the moment. She continued moving her telescope around and found a very red looking star just peeking out from her viewing area.

Kurumi was blushing now. The star she had seen earlier wasn't Jupiter at all. Oops. So much for thinking that she had found it.

Sky pulled her telescope from her bag and quickly freed it of lint. Now, where was it again? Hmm…not there, that's the moon. She moved the telescope over a few inches and looked again. Nope not there. This continued on for few minutes until she saw what she thought was Mercury, but she wasn't 100% sure. " Hmm… I wonder," she said very quietly to herself.

Jenny slowly took out her telescope and started setting it up in front of a huge window. Oh joy, she hadn't used this in a while...

Jenny looked into the telescope while twisting the adjustment knob, only to step back and blink constantly. That was so blurry! After she got her eyes to concentrate again, Jenny looked back and twisted the knob a bit more slowly this time. Ah. Much better.

"Mercury, where are you?" Jenny whispered to herself. She turned her telescope a bit to the left, only to find random stars far away.

She even forgot what Mercury was supposed to look like.

Harvey took out his telescope and set out to look for Mercury, but he could not see. But he carried on looking

Louisa went to the cupboard and got a telescope. She hadn't managed to buy one even with her recently-raised allowance. Carefully she carried it to one of the windows and placed it there, pointing its lens to the sky. Louisa glanced at the other students sneakily and did what they seemed to be doing, she put an eye on the see-through end and blinked. It was a very vast scene. So big and great.

The girl didn't even know what to look for exactly so she just stared through the telescope and enjoyed the sight. Mercury, on the other hand, could wait. Not that she knew what it looked it. Heh.

Eino took our his telescope, and after setting it up he began his attempt at finding the planet. He drew himself closer to the apparatus, closed his left eye and looked through it with his right one. He used his left hand to support the telescope and his right to move it around. He couldn't see anything that looked like a Mercury though, all he could see were stars. None of them looked particularly Mercury-ish, some were bigger than others but that was normal. He continued to move the telescope around, searching for anything that was unusual and came across something very peculiar. It resembled at star, but it wasn't the same color as the rest. It was a bright shade of red and it didn't blink like the rest. This was worth noting, so he quickly pulled a piece of parchment and wrote down what he had observed. It could be a planet, or a comet, or the sun? Wait, no the sun was much bigger than that and not red, but stars could be red, right?