A few months ago, the boys participated in a space exploration merit badge with a woman who works for NASA in California. I am most definitely not a space nut, but her seminar was so interesting, I found myself enthralled. When I saw that she was offering another badge in astronomy, I immediately signed the boys up.

Yet another bonus of moving out to the country has been refamiliarizing ourselves with the heavens. In town, even on a dark night, you could never see the stars. Now, I find myself wandering outside after dark quite frequently just to look up. Over the past year, we’ve introduced the kids to the Big and Little Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Milky Way. Early evening will usually have the Wonderful Husband asking the kids which planets are appearing first, and we’ve been blessed with some incredible full moon rises.

Earlier this summer, the WH and I scoured the skies for Comet NEOWISE, and then dragged the kids out to look at it for a full 30 seconds. Astronomy has always been around us, but we’ve never really dug into it.

Armed with the list of requirements from the Scout merit badge work sheet, we rallied the troops and headed out to the backyard, where for the next 20 minutes, the boys did nothing but tell Uranus jokes. I would have thought that after the first five minutes, it would have gotten old, but even half an hour later, when G beckoned me under the pretense of asking me to help him identify a constellation and then telling me to “never mind” because “it was just Uranus,” they still found themselves hilarious.

As much as I hate that screens intruded into our little star gazing party, using apps like Star Chart and Sky View is a significant improvement over the old days when you’d have to drag a star chart and a flashlight out with you, and spend 20 seconds letting your eyes adjust every time you had to try to see something on the chart. It almost made it too easy for them to jot down 10 constellations and five planets when they found them, but luckily for them, they have a mom who just loved mythology growing up, and who was more than happy to tell them the stories behind the constellations.

I say lucky, but I’m not so sure that’s the word they would have used. What did A ask me? “Why do you know all this stuff, Mom?” And, he said it like he wasn’t impressed. But really, who can remember the specific brand of chocolate milk that A wanted at the grocery store when you’ve got juicy stories like Zeus and his lover Callisto, and his jealous wife Hera stuck in your head?

I was surprised that he wasn’t more familiar with this stuff, because he had grown up loving Percy Jackson and the new Olympians book series. I scored my second teenage eye roll of the evening with a “Mom, you know that stuff isn’t real, right? Like, we don’t have seasons because some lady is sad that her daughter got kidnapped by some evil guy who lives underground. You know that, right?”

For a split second, I distinctly got the feeling that he might have been worried he really was telling me something I didn’t know.

So, I decided that it was a great time to show him how really crazy I could be. One of the quests that they had to fulfill was finding at least four zodiac signs. I’m not really sure how my kids have made it this long without knowing about the zodiac.

I guess they didn’t grow up reading 17 magazines and planning an entire month of their life on the horoscope in the back. Of course, I knew their zodiac signs, and the specific traits that make them typical of their sign, and all that mumbo jumbo. And, by now A was really convinced he’d been kidnapped by aliens. G heard that he was a Sagittarius, the archer, and that was really all he needed to know. As far as he was concerned, “good hunter” completely applied to him, in fact, it was obvious that he “HAD” to be that sign.

A was still quite skeptical. He immediately jumped on the fact that the WH and E share a birthday. “So, they’re both the same sign, and they should act the same way. But, they don’t, so clearly there is a flaw in that plan,” he said. I got the feeling that he was starting to back away from us slowly.

Luckily, we were in the middle of the Perseid meteor showers, and a few shooting stars interrupted our conversation before A became completely convinced that his parents were off the deep end. However, the zodiac and horoscopes were a hot topic for the next few days.

Each of them had, of course, taken the time to read up on their own signs. Each of them found certain things that were very dominant in their personalities and fit them to a T, and then they found other things that were way off base. A made the astute observation that “these things seem to be written so that they could apply to anyone.”

A few days later, when they met with their astronomy class, the counselor explained that because of slight changes in the earth’s axis, the signs don’t quite line up with how they used to, and if they ever felt like their sign didn’t apply to them, that that could be why. Of course, as a pure scientist, she was speaking slightly tongue in cheek, and both of the boys came to the conclusion that while it was interesting to learn about, it wasn’t going to change their day-to-day existence.

One of A’s other observations was to imagine how bored someone had to be to stare at the sky long enough to see some of these images, much less invent stories about them. As we talked about the ancient people who might have been at sea for months, or traveling through the desert, and how they only had the stars to guide them, I became a little sad at how easy it is for my kids to whip out a cellphone, pull up a GPS, and immediately know their longitude and latitude. Then again, I guess that beats trying to figure out where you are based on Uranus.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.