We started the day by planting carrots and lettuce in the greenhouse. This is to give us some winter vegetables and we have more seeds on their way to be sown in the next couple of days.
This is our first planting in the greenhouse over winter to try and see what vegetables we can grow. Then we planted a small amount of carrots outside in the kitchen garden to see how they compare to the ones grown under glass.
In the evening we did some star gazing in the back garden. We are really lucky to be up high and have very little light pollution near the house. We saw two major constellations and one planet.
Mars was looking bright and rather red for a planet so far away. The sunlight takes 13 minutes to reach Mars. So if Mars was destroyed we would see it 13 minutes too late. Mars is one of five planets easily visible to the naked eye, the others are Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. We also found that there are 24.7 hours in a Mars day. This means that Mars’ year is 255.5 hours or 10.7 days longer than earth. So we could have an extra long Christmas, birthday or taking a longer holiday. What’s not to like?