Bob Nicholson can make the sun rise in the west, the stars come out at noon and the moon wax and wane with his whims.
“I will show you what the sky will look like on your last day of fifth grade,” the 56-year-old educator told students gathered one afternoon this month in the domed planetarium at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.
“This is not only a space machine,” he continued, “it’s a time machine.”
Open-mouthed, the Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy fifth-graders stared up as the sun suddenly took Nicholson’s cue, rising and setting on the course it would take June 19, the last day of school.