Human ingenuity is bringing us closer and closer to understanding the cosmos, but of all the questions, one, perhaps the biggest one of all remains unanswered, i.e. are we alone in the universe, or is there other life out there?

For many, astronomy means the study of the night sky and the objects that it contains, but what we do not realize is, it is much more than just pointing a giant telescope at the sky and trying to figure out what these faraway objects are, in fact, by studying objects that are billions and billions of kms away, we are only trying to dig deeper into our own past, still trying to very much understand the conditions that eventually led to our own existence..

Modern Astronomy is built on foundations laid by great scholars such as Galileo and Copernicus, today we use powerful giant telescopes and cutting edge technology to study the sky and our sight is only limited by our technology.

Amateur astronomy does not involve any of these high-tech instruments or terms and understandings, it only deals with the observational half of it, all you would need is a chart of the night sky, a pair of binoculars perhaps or just a modest telescope, and you too can take pleasure in unlocking the mysteries of the Cosmos.

The night sky as we see it is made up of 88 constellations (groups/ patterns of stars), 12 of which forms the Zodiacal constellations, the moon, our neighboring planets, and of course hundreds and thousands of stars, and tens of thousands of deep sky objects (Galaxies, nebulae and star clusters) all catalogued as either M objects or NGC objects.

Stars and galaxies too, just like us are born, live and die- a process that takes many millions of years. By observing the billions of stars around, each in different phases of its life we are able to understand this process, the forces of nature that act upon, helping us understand the secrets of our Sun and the formation of our planet. Scientists widely believe this to be important as it shapes our future and also reveals our fate.

Our ordinary sense of distance fails while scaling these realms of stars and galaxies. For example, our Galaxy, the Milky Way, alone, is said to consist of a hundred billion stars, most of which are known to have planets. Just like our Sun, it is also a hundred thousand light years wide and roughly a thousand light years thick. We need a much larger unit like the Light year (A light year is the distance light travels in a year – approx ten trillion Kms)

It is said that more than 99.9% of the human race pass their entire course of life without the knowledge about the cosmos and their part in the universe & hence, my aim in writing to you is to bring down this huge difference , even by a small fraction and be more than happy to share this knowledge and joy of stargazing…

Tulsidharan M.
MSCLIS
IIIT Allahabad