Looking Up

I don't know where it all began. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, wanting to look at earth from space. Wanting to look at everything around here from the silence of space. Looking up at the sky was one of the thing I used as a kid, lying down in the dark, looking out of the window besides my bed, till the time night sky made me sleep.

One of my earliest memory of looking up was watching Hale-Bopp comet in the direction of sunset during summer of 1995. 

That image is still fresh in my mind. Whenever I think of it, I can clearly imagine myself sitting on that bench at Priyadarshini Park, by the sea, getting that same feeling that I had felt more then 25 years back.

Learning that Galileo invented the telescope to help him look at planets sparked a lot of curiosity in me as well. I wanted a telescope too! But never got it as a kid.

As I grew up, obviously I did not become an astronaut. I got busy with my life, floating around wherever it took me. Never bought a telescope. 

But every now and then, night sky kept on amazing me. I was amazed looking at the milky way, in freezing cold, outside my tent at 5000 meters above sea level after crossing Lamkhaga pass in Himalaya. 

I remember feeling wow when my eyes opened from sleep during night one of my offbeat excursions in a Rajasthani village neat Jaisalmer. I was sleeping in open.

Always felt amazed on spotting International Peace Station or Hubble Space Telescope serendipitously, or while observing blood moon after stepping out of office or while standing in moon's shadow during a solar eclipse or while just watching live feeds from ISS on YouTube.

But something was a miss. I had not done anything serious for this calling. This is something that has the power to make me feel lively. Something that I feel like doing for the sake of doing it.

As I see my son grow, I do not want all those things for him. I want him to get in life that he thoroughly loves. Does things that he lives for. 

I realized, to give that to him, I need to be that person first!

After my usual dilly dally, a push from my supportive wife made me take the plunge.. I have purchased my first telescope. It's not with me yet. It will be delivered to me in 2-3 weeks time. 

I don't know where it will take me. I do not even know if I will be able to operate it once I receive it in my hands. I do not know if my interest will last.

But all I know is that I am happy to take that plunge. Scared of making an expensive mistake, but also excited to see how things unfold. Scared that it might be one of the many things that I left after working on it for a bit, but thrilled to have started the journey. I will do everything to ensure that the kid by the window stays alive. Not to let difficulties override that spark.

This blog is one such thing to help me keep going. 

Looking up from pale blue dot is my attempt to keep this feeling alive. As I move ahead in this journey I hope to convert my experiences into words, pictures and may be even videos.

The word "pale blue dot" adds lot of meaning in me. It was a term coined by Carl Sagan trying to give significance to the picture taken by Voyager 1, 6 billion kilometers away from earth.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

— Carl Sagan

... Thanks for reading, you are a star!