Star-watching from the Wadi Rayan dunes — the family astronomy evening.
The cooperative's two-hour astronomy evening is led by Mariam Tayel from the Tayel family camp, with the cooperative's eight-inch reflector telescope set up on the Wadi Rayan dune crest, fifteen kilometres south of Tunis Village. The session runs from October through April when the moon allows; the schedule shifts each month to coincide with the dark-sky window around the new moon, when the children can see the most.
The evening structure.
The session starts at sunset, which means anything from 17:15 in December to 18:30 in March. Families are collected from Tunis Village in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and driven to the dune site (twenty-five minutes' drive). On arrival the Tayel family camp's shade structure is already set up and tea is brewing; the telescope is assembled by Mariam in the last light. The session itself runs in three parts. The first part — twilight to dark — is the naked-eye sky tour, when Mariam walks the family across the early-evening stars as they emerge: Venus where applicable, then the bright stars of the visible constellations of the season, the milky-way arc as it becomes visible, the basic geography of the night sky. The first part takes about thirty minutes.
The second part is the telescope tour — about an hour. Mariam works the family through six or seven objects appropriate to the season: the moon if it is visible at the right phase (we time the sessions to avoid full moon because it washes out everything else), Jupiter and Saturn in their windows, Mars when it is bright enough, the Orion nebula in winter, the Andromeda galaxy in autumn, the Beehive cluster in spring, and one or two seasonal globular clusters. Children take turns at the eyepiece; the adult conversation continues at the side of the telescope. Mariam adjusts the focus for each child because the children's eyes refocus more sharply between objects than adult eyes do.
The third part is the sky-map exercise — twenty minutes. Each child receives a sheet of black card and a sharpened white pencil. The exercise is to draw the sky as they see it, with as much or as little detail as they want. Some children produce careful constellation maps; others sketch the brightest stars only; one of the cooperative's all-time favourite results was a fourteen-year-old who drew the milky way as a flowing river with a small figure of herself standing on the dune crest looking up. The cooperative archives the most-interesting sky-maps with the child's permission and we hang the best of each season in the office.
The telescope.
The cooperative's telescope is an eight-inch Dobsonian reflector — a serious amateur instrument capable of resolving Jupiter's cloud bands clearly, the Cassini gap in Saturn's rings on a steady night, the Andromeda galaxy as more than a smudge, and the major globular clusters as resolved star fields. The telescope was acquired by the Tayel family in 2014 with a Fayoum Heritage Foundation grant earmarked for the astronomy programme; it has been used at the dune site approximately three hundred and forty evenings since then. Maintenance — collimation, mirror cleaning every two years, eyepiece swaps — is performed by Mohsen Tayel personally and the telescope's optical performance is checked against a known target before every season.
What we have seen on a typical evening.
A representative session in late January 2026 (recorded in Mariam's session log): twilight Venus low west, Jupiter rising in the east with three of the four Galilean moons visible at the eyepiece (one was behind the planet at the time), Mars high overhead small but red, Orion's belt and the great nebula M42 in some detail at the eyepiece, the Pleiades with the embedded nebulosity faintly visible, Andromeda M31 as an elongated smudge through the wide-field eyepiece, the Beehive M44 in resolved star clusters, two meteors caught during the naked-eye part of the session. Total objects observed: eight. Children's attention held: the full two hours. Adults' attention held: the same.
Moon phase and scheduling.
The cooperative schedules astronomy sessions in the ten-day window centred on each new moon, the dark-sky period when the Milky Way is visible and the fainter objects through the telescope are most rewarding. Full-moon and near-full sessions are avoided because the moonlight washes out everything except the moon itself and the bright planets. Mariam publishes a public moon-phase calendar on the cooperative's December update with the suggested dates for the next twelve months; the calendar is also emailed to active members each November.
Family rating and weather.
Recommended from age six upward; younger children can attend but typically lose attention after the telescope's third or fourth object. The session runs in clear-sky conditions only — Wadi Rayan has roughly twenty-two clear nights per month between October and April. If the forecast at noon on the session day shows cloud cover above forty percent, Mariam reschedules to the next clear evening; we have rescheduled fifteen times in the past three years. Bring warm layers — the dune crest is exposed to the desert wind and the temperature drops sharply after sunset.
The astronomy session is the second night of the White Desert overnight if the moon allows. The session is also the most-frequent addition to a Wadi El-Hitan day or a Lake Qarun day. For the warm-layer kit list, see kids' trail essentials.