It is. I work with the scouts some and take my telescope out to a dark sky preserve and I try to get them to look up. Most kids cant even point at Polaris, Jupiter, some know the big dipper, but not many. The ones that come to get an easy badge, I try and snag em into it, and I do get one or two to an astronomy club meeting, but it does sadden me that most kids could care less.
The best one I ever heard coming away from the scope was from a 11 year old boy. It wasnt wow, or thats really neat, or anything like that. When he stepped away from the scope, his eyes were really shiny, and your eyes can water up from the strain, but when i told him next time not to try so hard and just let his eye work, he said his eyes were fine. He told me that it was the most beautifull thing he had ever saw. He had jsut looked at the double cluster in Perseus, an open cluster divided by a dark nebula. Hundreds of stars that looks like diamonds strewn about in a very tiny area. It is beautifull. Just never expected something like that from a kid. It does help the telescope is big enough to launch a butterball turkey out of it, so you do see ALOT more than you could with what most people think of when you say telescope ( you know, the one on the tripod sitting in the livingroom).
If we cant get kids interested in these kind of things, we are likely to lose a great resource, which is our night sky. As I said earlier, light pollution kills the night sky, and if it isnt controlled, we lose something that helped bring civilzation to us. It told the early peoples when to plant their crops, it gave sailors the only way to navigate the seas and oceans(and then together with the ship born clock when it was invented), and to this day helps us keep accurate time.
Wow, didnt mean to go on like that, Ill shut up now
