One of my favourite classes, not including flying lessons and such, is Astronomy. I have three reasons for this. First, it's outdoors. The only other class to allow you to spend the entire lesson outside is Care of Magical Creatures, and that one is - hmmm. Unpredictable, I think is the best word for it. You could either be running for your life or trying to entice a semi-animate object to eat a lettuce leaf. But with Astronomy class, it's always peaceful, if not always necessarily calm. And I do prefer to be outdoors. i feel most at home with the wind in my hair.
Second, the stars and the night sky in general absolutely fascinate me. When I was little, my dad used to take me out on the moor at night, lay our Axminster gently on the heather and we'd climb on it, hovering about five inches above the flowers. Dad tried hard to help me see the constellations in the sky. I was most interested in the bears - how could bears live in the sky? But I just didn't see them as bears until Dad checked all around and then created a little glow light as a pointer and outlined the bear for me, showing me which stars to look at and where the bear was hiding in the dark. To this day, when I look up at the night sky, I see the glowing orange outlines of the papa and baby bears, and it makes me smile.
But the main reason I love Astronomy here at school is the telescope. Before I started at Hogwarts, telescopes were completely forbidden. No use asking, I have no idea why. After all, loads and loads of Muggle families have similar telescopes. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about the one I bought in Diagon Alley when compared with my Muggle cousins' contraption. A telescope is a telescope is a telescope.
Or is it?
Telescopes, my friends, open up a whole new world! Sure, it is insanely cool to look at the craters on the Moon or the rings around Saturn, or even a meteor shower. And I've even figured out how to enchant mine to show my wonderful bears in full fiery color any time I look at them. But telescopes can do so much more than just look at stars and planets and space dust. Once, I shrank my telescope to pocket size so that I could scope out the com... pe... *cough* On second thought, maybe I shouldn't put those particular uses into words. Just think 'daytime practice' and more horizontal than vertical. Come to think of it, maybe this is why telescopes were forbidden at home.
Or maybe my parents are just nutters.