My Fascination for the Night Sky
I remember looking up at the sky when I was a kid and had no idea what the thousands of dots in the sky were. They looked like tiny pin pricks which showed bits of some holy daylight from beyond the otherwise dark night sky.
I remember when I was a small child I would go to my paternal village almost every summer during the vacations. And there we would have load-shedding and power cuts for long long hours in the village and at least half a dozen other villages nearby. In any village on the Eastern Coast of India, in the middle of May, this would mean sweltering heat and sleeplessness. This used to force many people out from their homes, who would look for places outside -by the village pond, near the village Hanuman temple, by the canal that runs by the village etc -basically all places where there was a higher probability of bit more comfortable temperatures and less humidity.
Sitting at the pedestal near the village temple on a dark summer night, I would ask my grandfather who would then point out a few stars and constellations in the night sky to me and tell me what their names were. He would point his finger at some part of the sky and tell me "Seita sethi hauchhi Kruttika. Eita dekhuchhu pua? Emaane hauchhanti saptarsi -saata janna rusi" (That over there is the Kruttika. Do you see this one little fellow? These are the seven sages of the Saptarshi). I would listen very carefully -partly out of awe for the brilliance of the stars in the night sky and the occasional flash of a shooting star, partly because this would serve as a pretty good distraction from the uncomfortable insomnia in the dark hot humid night. Soon, it became a ritual thanks to the power cuts which were as regular as I was then in attending classes. Even the days on which the power cuts failed to show up, I would still go with grandpa at least for sometime for an evening stroll and he would explain why the stars and constellations other than the Polaris -the north star have moved. I soon begun to readily relish these small tidbits of facts. And I soon begun to come up with many questions. He would answer some, and sometimes he would find my questions naive and difficult to answer.
Either way, it only made me grow in wonder and awe for the brilliance of the Summer Night sky. Like William Shakespeare's celebrated play, this was my own Mid Summer Night's Dream...
And that was probably the beginning of a four-year old’s fascination for the night sky; the thousands of bright pinpricks –the twinkling little stars. And it continues to grow even today. For all of you out there, who feel or have felt even the tiniest of inklings of awe and wonder for the vast dark night sky at some point of time; I’m sure you have your own story to tell.
Throughout man’s existence on the planet, since the time of the early Neanderthal man, he has tried to explain what the sky, the pinpricks meant; what they implied. We had our share of men –astronomers and physicists who strived to solve the mysterious unexplained, right above them in the sky.
“Where does it come from? This quest, this need to solve life's mysteries, of the simplest of questions can never be answered. Perhaps we'd be better not looking at all, not delving, and not yearning. But that's not human nature, not the human heart. That is not why we are here.” We will keep looking. We will keep searching for answers. We will always be awed by the mahakaash. We will keep looking at the constellations, the stars, the planets, the nebulae, the thousands of pinpricks and wonder. And be amazed now, tomorrow, for many many years to come.
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Men came and went. Theories came and went. Models of the Universe explaining why the night sky is the way it is, were given. Few of them accepted. Even they went. The only thing that stayed the way it was, was the sky and man’s fascination for the unexplained.For the thousands of bright pinpricks in the sky...
(This was part of an article that I wrote quite some time back for the blog of Astronomy Club, Manipal. You can visit the blog here and the original un-edited article here.)
