Author: Pradeep

  • Happy New Year 2019

    Happy New Year 2019 to all.

  • Aurangabad

    We decided to spend a two day holiday at Aurangabad. Aurangabad is close to 150 km from our current base at Lonar. We had a pleasant three day stay in Aurangabad. We went mostly for buying stuff for our home. Pictures are from our stay in the hotel.


    • Poha
    • Bread and Omlette
    • In the hotel lobby
    • Mom and daughter bonding

    Aurangabad reminded us so much of Mumbai because it has one of the only nearby malls. We also drove rather leisurely and enjoyed the ride with music. We didn’t want to rush back to Lonar and stayed on for another day.

  • Trip November 2018

    I’m writing this at the Waiting Room at the Jalna Railway Station. After four months, I finally got my leave sanctioned for one week.

    We’re going now to Mumbai on 17618 Tapovan Express. Then, we catch a train to Kolkata where we are going to attend my cousin Vishy’s engagement. Then, we fly to Hyderabad where we stay with my grand uncle before taking the train back to Jalna and go by car to Lonar.

  • Diwali 2018

    It was our first Diwali in Lonar in a rental house. Dhanya wanted to celebrate by lighting a lot of lamps.

    She had bought a dozen lamps in one of her trips to Akola. On another visit she managed to purchase a handsome hanging lantern and a larger lamp.

    On Diwali, she lit all the lamps and we managed to take a lot of pics that we shared via our feed on Instagram. Above we have a video tour of all the lamps mentioned in this post. The hanging lantern was one of the most commented and asked about in the collection.

    My father wanted us to buy crackers to show Rithika. He asked us to atleast light sparklers. We ended up lighting up none, this Diwali.

  • The Mars Orbiter Mission story

    Imran Khan has directed a short movie on the Mars Orbiter Mission and is now available on YouTube (trailer).

    The video helped me relive September 24, 2014 again. On that day, I watched Mars Orbit Insertion from Mumbai while my fiance (and now my wife) watched with her sister in Kerala. On that day, she didn’t understand the importance of the crucial Mars Orbit Mission maneuver. But, she got it only today after watching the video with me today.

    Must watch whether you follow space and definitely if you have a partner with whom you want to communicate the enthusiasm for space exploration.

  • Hi! From Lonar

    It’s September. I’ve moved to Lonar and moved my family here for work. It has a hypervelocity crater and the work doesn’t give me too much time to spend there.

  • Pradeep’s Space Podcast Episode 0.1

    Show Notes:

     

  • Revati

    Revati is Zeta Piscium. It is the “star” under which my daughter was born. So, I seem to have a mental filter that catches that phrase in Twitter’s flowing timeline. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society had posted there on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) naming a few surface features on Charon, Pluto’s moon. She had also linked to the IAU press release on the same.

    They had named a crater on Charon, Revati. The press release mentioned that the feature Revati was named after a character in the epic, Mahabharata where she was a time traveller. The excerpt is below:

    Revati Crater

    I immediately searched on Google for the story of Revati. Emily, meanwhile, emailed one of the contacts mentioned in the press release to ask the source story of the name. My Google search led to the interesting story of Revati.

    The story of Revati seems to be straight out of science fiction. She is the daughter of Kakudmi who seems to have ruled a kingdom half under the sea. Her father travels to meet Brahma to seek advice on a suitable husband for his daughter. While there, they listen to a small musical performance. At the end as Kakudmi asks Brahma to choose from a list Brahma states that most of the people suggested would be dead as as they waited there, 27 mahayugas have passed and suggested that she marry Balarama, Krishna’s brother when they return. Does this reference time dilation? When they return, humans are much smaller than them. Does this reference the evolutionary process?

    I found the best narrative of the same on another blog, along with an interesting after comment. The comment is below:

    Revati Time Traveller

    In the meanwhile, Emily got the references and this is more fascinating reading. The book is Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy by Richard L Thompson.

    I am a skeptic of the reinterpretations of past treatises using modern astronomy but am equally fascinated by these comparative studies of astronomical treatises of the present and the past and enriched by myths with science fiction elements involved.

  • Falcon Heavy Launch

    If you haven’t seen the Falcon Heavy launch video already on YouTube, you must. If you’ve seen it, it’s worth watching again and again if you like this sorta stuff again and again.

    I did not watch the launch live but a live feed was going on as I watched the launch by scrolling back as the vehicle flew to orbit.

    It was lovely to see the updates on Twitter (by Elon Musk as well as other space tweeps). It was a lovely accompaniment to the live video feed on YouTube. It almost made it look like that these were tools specifically made for this purpose. Reddit went too crazy for me to meaningfully follow it on mobile.

    The launch was spectacular in the following as well. It almost felt as exhilarating as watching the early Apollo missions.

    Towards the afternoon Sandhya Ramesh wrote for The Wire magazine answering some of the questions that many people seemed to have had about the mission. Stephen Clark at Spaceflight Now has the most descriptive write up of today’s events itself. I haven’t seen any write up yet about the implications of the launch worth sharing that I’m not already sharing on my Tumblr.

  • Nokia 6

    Purchased a Nokia 6 yesterday from Croma store at Horniman Circle yesterday on the way back from watching the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival.