I’d been on a trip to Hyderabad-Vellore-Thiruvananthapuram. At Hyderabad, my friend from Planetary Society, India took me for my first night sky observation through a telescope and my first International Year of Astronomy 2009 observation.
We got there around 8:30 pm after a day long tour of Hyderabad. Wasn’t too tired keeping in mind the astronomy. The place was a place close to the border of Osmania University called Ramanathapuram. This place actually had temperatures a few degrees below the norm.
It started getting shivery after a while. We headed to the place where the scope was kept along with the accompanying kit and motorcycled it to the observation place. Raghunandan at this point, likened it to taking India’s first sounding rocket on a cycle. Telescope on a motorcycle. Heheh. Please don’t forget that we’re still shivering. It was cold. 9 degrees C without any warm clothes.
As we dropped the telescope at home, we headed for dinner on the motorbike – the wind made the whole thing even worse and it became shivering cold. Actually felt my knee joints shiver.
Back at the observation post, we discovered the Moon didn’t help too much of the deep sky observation but we pointed it to the Moon and saw its termination line. We also got sight of the Orion nebulae.
We then settled down into bed and then early morning we got up for a beautiful glimpse at Saturn. We had a lot of fun in between exploring UFO and aliens in space possibilities including several ideas for infra-red telescopes. Lots of fun!
Parallel Spirals 