Twinkle Twinkle little star

Part – 1: Some mental level preparation we need before we can begin to appreciate the subject of astronomy.

The Splendour of bright twinkling stars in a dark night, the beauty of full moon, the rising of sun in the morning and the setting of sun in the evening as the halo of red light surrounding it is something which whether you are young or not so young is something that nobody can miss, if you are the one who happened to not notice it so far stop all your work and go to your balcony or roof in the night and spend at least 10 minutes looking at the magnificent sky silently.

You need not to be a scientist, you could be an ordinary person struggling to earn your Living. May be you reach so late night from work that you have found no time to look at these Majestic heavenly bodies. It is true that as a child we have more time to look at sky.

A child as he grows up and starts playing outside his home. In the day, he avoids looking directly into the bright sun as his mother has cautioned him not to look at Sun directly for too long. As the darkness of the evening sets in, looking at Sky full of twinkling bright objects and starts wondering what they are. He has heard many stories about the moon in the sky, not much about stars except perhaps that each star represents one of his ancestors.

The sky, as most of you will agree, is so interesting to look at that some believe it is a child first exposure to vastness of the universe and maybe the first start of curiosity which is the mother of all scientific progress about objects surrounding him.

From time in memorial, the beauty of the starry Sky in a Dark night has inspired everyone in many many ways. Earlier it was thought to be an Abode of God and the place from where child comes when born and returns to it finally later on.
Infact looking at a sky is a first direct experience of the physical realization of the concept of infinity, a concept commonly used in mathematics. Looking at Sky and wondering what does shining objects are, has a very long history almost as long as the start of human Civilization. While our ancestors were curious to find and explore, they had hardly any means to do it, except gazing at it carefully. Maybe, you may argue, they had more time to look at Sky as they did not have luxury of watching TV and mobile screen that keeps us busy now a days. The more important points however, is that despite their keenness all they had only eyes and no optical or radio telescopes to aid them. Still it is remarkable to note that they could prepare a chart of stars, they patterns visible at different seasons of the Year (constellations). Constellation is a imaginary pattern of a group of stars that can be seen from Earth. As season changes this pattern may also change, some of these constellations are also known as Zodiac or rashis.

The present introductory article is less about astronomy as such but more about preparing ourselves mentally to open our vision to the vastness of distance and the time scales involving in Astronomy beyond. You will be in a rude shock as you think you are very important person. So many followers on social media like Facebook, Twitter, you are a big boss and in your office so many people say yes sir to you and so on. The first step before you are ready to go into the fascinating subject of astronomy is either keep aside or at least downsize your ego. We need to accept and grasp the fact before we proceed any further that neither we nor our country nor our continent nor our earth nor our human civilization is of any importance in the Grand scheme and scale of this ever expanding universe. There exist billions and billions of such planets and stars. All stars, like we humans, have life cycle, they are born, they grow and finally die and along with it all the planets of that Star get orphaned. Of course it does take billions of year.

To get started, it is important to develop an appreciation of mind boggling time scale and enormous distances involve. A common unit used in astronomy is the distance light travels in a year called light year which is 9.46 trillion kilometre distance and we talk of stars millions of light year away in the same casual way we talk of hours and day in our daily mundane life that we humans lead.

The article to be continued next week.