Astronomy
Astronomy happened at midnight.
This was the aspect of the subject that he had thought about in the abstract since reading the Hogwarts curriculum and had understood differently once he was actually standing on the Astronomy tower at midnight in late September, with the castle and the grounds below him and the sky above him doing what the Scottish sky did when it was clear — which was to be very large and very dark and full of more than it appeared to contain from ground level.
Professor Sinistra had the manner of someone whose relationship with the night sky was long and functional and entirely unromantic, which made her an interesting teacher. She did not ask her students to feel anything about the stars. She asked them to record what they saw with accuracy and to understand the mechanisms that produced what they saw, and she found sentiment about the subject about as useful as sentiment about a piece of measuring equipment.
He found this approach congenial.
The practical work was the telescope and the star charts — the specific, precise work of identifying celestial bodies and recording their positions and tracking their movements against the charts with the accuracy that the examinations required. He had the engineering instinct for this kind of work: systematic, patient with the instrument, interested in the mechanism behind the observation. The telescope was a tool and he used it like one, with the focused attention of someone who understood that a tool used correctly produced better results than a tool used with enthusiasm.
The theoretical component was the part that engaged a different register.
He had read the third-year Astronomy text over the summer and had found it, somewhat to his own surprise, more interesting than he had expected. Not the catalogue of names and positions — that was the framework, necessary but not the point — but the underlying question of what the magical world's relationship to the stars actually was. The connection between celestial position and magical effect was not simply astrology, not in the dismissive way the word was used. There was a genuine mechanism: the way certain planetary alignments affected the efficacy of specific potions, the historical record of magical events clustering around celestial events in ways that were statistically significant. The mechanism was not fully understood even in the literature he had access to, which meant it was a genuinely open question, and genuinely open questions were the most interesting kind.
He mentioned this to Sinistra in the second lesson, after the observation work, when there was a few minutes before the class was dismissed.
"The correlation between the Aries alignment and the efficacy of transformation potions," he said. "The historical data in chapter six is significant but the mechanism isn't proposed anywhere in the text."
Sinistra looked at him with the focused attention of someone who had been asked a question they considered worth asking. "The mechanism is not established," she said. "The correlation is documented and reproducible. The mechanism remains speculative."
"What are the leading theoretical frameworks?" he asked.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she reached into the cabinet behind her desk and produced a thin monograph that had the look of something from a specialist journal rather than a teaching text. "This is fifteen years old," she said. "The field has not substantially advanced since it was published, which is not a compliment to the field. It represents the most rigorous theoretical treatment available." She paused. "It is not third-year reading."
"That's alright," he said.
She gave it to him with the specific expression Babbling and Flitwick had both worn — the one that was recalibrating what it expected from this particular student — and said nothing further about it, which was the right response.
He read the monograph over the following week, in the Room, alongside the other evening work. The theoretical frameworks it proposed were incomplete in interesting ways — the gaps in them were the kind of gaps that pointed toward where the answer was rather than away from it. He wrote three pages of notes and put them in the open questions section of his Astronomy notebook, where they sat alongside the question about Elder Futhark and Egyptian hieroglyphic magical script that he had not yet fully answered and the question about the specific mechanism of the magical prime sequence that Vector had confirmed was not yet theoretically resolved.
The open questions section was the longest section in any of his notebooks.
He considered this a good sign.
The midnight timing of Astronomy produced something the daytime lessons did not. The castle was quiet. The grounds were quiet. The lake had the reflective dark of a surface that was not doing anything in particular but was available to do things, and occasionally something moved in it with the slow deliberateness of something very large that was not in a hurry. The stars were the stars.
He had stood on rooftops in a previous life — in cities, where the light pollution reduced the sky to a handful of visible stars and the ambient noise of the city was always present underneath everything. This was not that. This was a sky that went all the way down to the horizon without interruption, and he was thirteen years old on a tower in Scotland, and the stars were doing nothing but being exactly what they were, and he found that he had nothing to do with that except look.
He took a photograph from the tower on the third session — the grounds below, the lake's dark reflection, the castle's western turrets catching the moon at the edge of the frame. Not the sky itself; photographs of the sky at night produced something that looked like a dark rectangle with white dots, which was accurate but not the point. The point was the context — standing somewhere with this much visible above you and this much visible below and understanding that both of those things were the same place.
The photograph developed into something he was not quite expecting.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he put it in the collection inside the lid of his trunk, beside the one of Neville laughing during the Boggart lesson and the one of the staff table on the first night and the one of the Cleansweep Eights in the equipment shed.
The collection was becoming something.