Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on April 6, 2011. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
For quite some time now, I have been thinking about what to do generally between work. The thought of traveling did strike me as a useful thing to do. While I have not arrived at any useful direction on what to do for work, I have come to an idea on what to do between work or to take a break from work.
The idea is an extension on my “Telescopes of India” tour, which did not really work out so well. The idea is to travel to a country which has an astronomical observatory. What I would do next is not really very clear to me now. But, I think I’ll figure things out as I learn more and more about the observatory itself. I don’t know if there’s a genre called “scientific travel writing” but it would be an interesting genre to begin writing in.
There are many people interested in visiting scientific places – like observatories and laboratories. It’ll be interesting to see how an ordinary guy is given entrance to these facilities. This will be in addition to living with a scientist and learning about the “scientific culture” of the organisation. I think that’s how I would define scientific travel writing.
This is really the first draft of this idea but it sounds like an interesting concept for me to try and explore in the future. Since, I have been following the space and astronomy community, this is where I hope to begin probing. It’s a huge experiment.
Parallel Spirals 