Look up at the stars

Representational image. (Photo: Simon Delalande via Unsplash)

Nearly 147.56 million kilometre. How does one stare that far at a gigantic heat ball named the Sun? Or the Saturn that is hemmed with rings and is 4.503 billion years old? Or peer at Venus that has no moons and no one knows why? Or Mars, the dusty, cold desert that is 227.9 million kilometre from the sun? Can one actually see these planets in the dark sky? And the black sunspots in daylight?

On that long bumpy ride to St Regis Hotel (Goa), I was caught in a mathematical quandary. Can the silver Sky-Watcher Classic Dobsonian telescope with an 8-inch aperture reduce the distance between earth and sun by 48 times? If it did, the sun would then be about 3.07 million miles away. Seemed too much of a mathematical muddle but I was ready to star/sun gaze through a Starscapes mobile observatory sitting on the lawns of the tony hotel.

The afternoon sun was scorching hot and Hem Sharma, the Starscapes star-guide, was busy adjusting the telescope for the best view of the sunspots that appear darker than the surrounding areas on the sun’s photosphere.

“The sunspots are colder than other parts of the sun, but they are still very hot. Really hot. Say, 3,589.74 degree Celsius. The Death Valley, the world’s hottest place, is not even 60 degree Celsius. The lava of the volcano is only about 1,090 degree Celsius.” Sharma was dropping heat-numbers while I adjusted the cardboard sunglasses for a look at the sunspots. But Hem Sharma had other ideas. Stare at the sun through an ordinary pair of sunglasses and then catch the same spot through the telescope.

I closed one eye and adjusted the other on the round eyepiece. In that one moment, millions of miles between the Sun and I vanished. On the flaming hot ball, the black sunspots were so visible. Tiny dots on the photosphere. Like little freckles on a porcelain-skinned woman.

Sharma was narrating stories about sun — from mythology, from science, history and geography. That’s how Starscapes evokes interest in street astronomy. No jargon. No scientific spiel. Astronomy explained in everyday language interspersed with fascinating stories.

In about 20 minutes, the sun-show was over. I had seen the sun as never before. I whooped in delight. I had to wait for the sky to be swathed in its inky dress to gaze at the twinkling stars and the planets that I had befriended through school textbooks.

7.30 pm. “That’s Venus. That’s Saturn. And can you see Jupiter?” Twinning in black with the night sky, Sharma was pointing the green laser at gleaming sequins in the sky. I squinted. Squinted harder. All the sequins in the sky looked the same. The rings of the Saturn were invisible. So were the stripes of Jupiter. I kept peering at the night sky while Sharma fiddled with the fat silver telescope tube to align it with the planets.

And then, magic happened. I closed one eye, stuck the other to the eyepiece and lo! Saturn was merely an aperture away. Tiny and monochrome but if I could put my hand through the lens, I could slip Saturn’s rings into my fingers. That is how close it looked. Venus seemed in a hurry, so Sharma trained the telescope for a quick Venus-view before it walked away into nowhere. Then, Jupiter, the great comet catcher. Mars. And a nebula. The luminescent cosmic dust looking like a blob of scattered glitter. Suddenly, everything from my middle school geography lessons came alive. At the Starscapes mobile observatory, I had seen the planets as they are. Sitting millions of miles away from us, yet there within the aperture.

On that bumpy road back home, I was no longer caught in a mathematical quandary. I was lost in the thoughts of the Dobsonian telescope and a Vedanta monk. The monk called John Dobson (1915-2014), the telescope’s inventor, who popularised sidewalk astronomy and dedicated his life to astronomy outreach. In 1944, Dobson had joined the Vedanta Society monastery in San Francisco, becoming a monk of the Ramakrishna order. One of his jobs at the monastery was to reconcile astronomy with the teachings of Vedanta and that led to his interest in building telescopes.

I never met the monk who made telescopes. But that day, I met the celestial bodies.

Good to know

Starscapes Shows: Sun Show. Star Gazing

Duration: 45 minutes

Cost per person: Rs 500-1,000, across all observatories

Website: starscapes.zone

Booking: starscapes.zone/booking. For all resort locations, booking is done at the reception

Other Starscapes location: Kausani, Bhimtal, Mukteshwar (Uttarakhand); At Club Mahindra resorts in Puducherry, Madikeri (Karnataka), Munnar (Kerala), Varca Beach (Goa), Virajpet (Karnataka), St Regis Hotel (Goa).

Other services provided by Starscapes: STEM workshops — Rocketry, optics, spectroscopy, extra-terrestrial terrain exploration. Astrophotography workshops and guest souvenirs like Selfie with the Stars.