I’ve always enjoyed looking up and gazing at the sky, be it the day or the night sky. During my childhood days, I lived in the suburbs of Mumbai, where there was less light pollution than in the cities. And that meant clearer skies.

We lived in a bungalow, so I had the entire terrace to myself. I used to lie down and gaze into the night sky with my pet dog for company (Remember Sweety? I’ll link up the posts related to her here, if you want to know more about her: https://twinklespark.wordpress.com/category/dog-days/ ). I remember one day my mom told me about a meteor shower that was about to occur the next night. She read about it in a newspaper. I was so excited and couldn’t wait! When the time had come, I went up to the terrace, spread the mattress in its usual spot, lied down and waited. Nothing. My mom joined me after a while. After sometime she pointed at a shooting star, I missed it. She pointed at another one in a few minutes, this time I saw something pass by from the corner of my eye, but only a glimpse. There was nothing for a long time after that. Just as we were about to get up, I spotted a shooting star! Ah, I was so happy! That was the first time I had clearly noticed a shooting star. I was about 7 or 8. I remember how I was glad to have seen a shooting star, but dejected to (apparently) not having seen a meteor shower after waiting for so long! Maybe we were looking in the wrong direction? Or maybe I had imagined so much more- I used to think meteor showers were more like a visible, horrific attack of meteors and asteroids on the Earth!

When I was a little older, say 10 or so, there was news about how a crescent moon, Jupiter and one other planet I don’t remember which now (possibly Mars?), would be so close to each other and in such a pattern that these three together would be resembling a ‘smiling face’. I did observe it and grew so fascinated by this marvel of universe that I asked my mom to call up my cousin so that he could watch it too, from some other part of the city.

When I was 12, my parents got me an Encyclopaedia and I remember jumping directly to the Astronomy section first, reading and gulping down everything I could and then moving onto the other sections.

These were some of the earlier days about how I got interested in the study of astronomy. I’m planning to post my experiences related to this field in a form of a series. Would you like that, or do you prefer some other way? Do let me know.

Do you like gazing into the sky? Does the workings of the universe fascinate you as well?

-Suri

P.S.: I crossed 1k followers on this blog last month, yayy!! Thank you so much for the love, you guys! I know I had been really inactive past couple of months, but I’ll try and make up for it!