Astronomy is a great project to involve your kids with. It can involve something as simple as travel to a place with dark skies - everyone should have a chance to appreciate the difference in the night sky between rural and urban areas. Binoculars are a useful addition, to show just how many more stars there are. You can join up with star parties and often get a chance to look through an amateur telescope. And, of course, nearly every state has some sort of observatory with a public outreach program.

In the old days, astronomy always involved staying out in the cold all night. (Even if you did your astronomy in a dome, the dome cannot be heated, because it distorts the optics and creates air currents to have a temperature differential between the instrument and the ambient sky.) As an undergraduate, I worked for a summer on a small telescope observing asteroids, finding each one from the ephemeris, verifying its position, and taking measurements of its brightness. Since asteroids are not spherical, and they rotate, most asteroids change in brightness over a period of hours or days. From the change in brightness, you can determine the rotational period, and make deductions about the shape and chemical composition of the object.

Today, some science is still done that way. But now, most telescopes are connected to instrumentation and computers that allow the astronomers to sit in a nearby (heated!) room, collecting images, spectra, and photometric (light level counts) data directly into a computer where they can be analyzed and recorded. Even the ones that are not usually use photographic plates rather than direct visual observation.

Even amateurs still make significant contributions to astronomy. Many computer-based data sets are now available online, where anyone with the time and interest can go through them. Amateur observers are sometimes the first to find new objects, like comets.

Though I was once paid to observe the night skies, I still find new and interesting truths revealed to me now that I live in an area of beautiful, dark skies. I watch the Milky Way's orientation drift lazily from summer to winter as the Earth's axis tilts. I associate star patterns with seasons. During the summer, I can guess the time fairly accurately from the stars.

So find some time, and some dark skies this summer. Bring a jacket.