Updated on Tuesday, June
28, 2005
Gaze up the Sky
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and
been widely regarded as a bad move.
- Douglas Adams, “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”
Reviews of interesting astro-corners on the World
Wide Web
Mars
Polar Lander Official Website
The ruckus about Pluto
Peering into the dark age following the Big Bang
The Outer Limits tit-bits page
"Inside a dark nebula is the only place in the Galaxy you'd
see a dark screen." - Zaphod
One... two... three... Stars were nothing more than numbers to
me as a kid as I lay gazing at the night sky from my terrace - I hoped to count
'em all, some day.
They also made objects of interest for sketching - for instance like a asterisk formed by an easy transpose of two triangles one
up & the other facing down. Even
before I learnt to identify wolves and the rabbits in the sky, the Greeks had
dissected the sky and clustered the twinkling specks of light into the Orion
& the Big Dipper a good 2000 years before then.
I never understood how the refracting or reflecting telescopes
worked nor did the Star-Trek or the E.T inspire me to take an interest in the
outer limits. Let's say the reason I got
sucked into the astro-pool was 'bad company' in
under-grad school. Just as I was
devouring anything from a lousy Hardley Chase novel
to Homer's Odyssey, I tripped and practically fell over Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and some
Arthur C. Clarkes' works, and lately Douglas
Adams. NOW! Here was something stimulating compared to
the humdrum "Captain! We are
nearing the Apolonomus galaxy - their warships are
trained on us" BS perpetrated by Capt. Kirk and crew. As fate would have it, I got lost into a
couple of college astro-club meetings which had a
duel-some 6" reflecting telescope and a reasonable bank balance. And of course there were plenty of stars in
the sky to watch.
If not for the Greeks and all the fascinating names & shapes
they had butchered the night sky into, I could never have sustained my interest
in the darker secrets of the cosmos.
Moreover I had a friend (called E.T) who had this nagging habit of keeping
a million pieces of information at his finger-tips and sprinkled it on us - the
'village-idiots'. Whenever there was a
chance - or even otherwise. The astro-club "encouraged" discussion on the
big-bang, formation of stars (which I learnt was nothing but a hot air balloon
- worse there was no balloon, just hot air)), stepped sometimes into the
unknowns of white-dwarfs, supernovas and hotly contested "the wave
theory" and how the "strings & threads" were more probable.
My staunch belief however is the Hinduism theory that states everything is Maya
- an illusion.
At every point of time during all my "planet earth"
years, I have been in the grips of some obsession - as a school kid I had the
most comprehensive collection of cricketer photographs, graduated to reading
the complete Hardy Boys collection, and in college it was all about identifying
every single constellation on the night sky.
Though I have never visited an observatory, I have traveled to remote
corners to escape the traces of city light and capture the night sky in full
blossom. You have to take my word for
it. The beauty is unmatched - an open
field and nothing but me & the stars - Fox Mulder would have probably believed that he was
floating in space under such conditions.
Four years after college, after going through some more queer
obsessions (ask me!) I'm back to where I've felt most satisfied - star
gazing. Unlike the past when I was
starved-off finding information (the pre-Internet age, as it will be identified
soon), or being unable to afford to buy a favorite magazine or book, I'm in a
comfortable situation now (called the employment age). I hope to have interesting information &
more in these few pages.
Back to Vadi's alternate universe