Musings of an amateur astronomer

Metals, Planets, and the Cosmic Story Beneath Our Feet “We are made of star stuff.” – Carl Sagan Hello, fellow sky-watchers! I just came back from a study trip to Hanle in Ladakh —a place many call the roof of the Earth . I went there as an amateur astronomer to enjoy the stars, but something else caught my eye. It was not only the night sky, but also the rocks and land beneath my feet . Under those clear skies, the Milky Way shone so bright that Orion almost looked crowded. It was nothing like the skies back home in Pune, where city lights dim the stars. For a moment, I imagined how ancient people might have read by starlight. But then, the geology of Ladakh pulled me back down to Earth. I asked myself: could the land beneath me and the sky above me be telling the same story ? The answer, I realized, was yes. Both astronomy and geology are threads of one big cosmic tale.   The Cosmic Pancake: How Planets Begin Around 4.6 billion years ago , our Solar System was not planets and m...

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, and Spirituality: Science or a Trap of Unknowns?   “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” – Werner Heisenberg   Quantum mechanics is one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. It explains how atoms behave, why the Sun shines, and how technologies such as semiconductors, lasers, and quantum computers work. Yet, despite its precision, it remains full of mysteries. Unlike Newtonian physics, which gave us comforting certainty, quantum mechanics speaks in probabilities, paradoxes, and uncertainties. Because of this strangeness, people often draw parallels between quantum mechanics and another great mystery: human consciousness and spirituality. The temptation is easy to understand. If both are unknown, they must be connected—so goes the reasoning. But is this comparison justified? Or is it a trap, where one unknown leans upon another unknown and pretends to be knowledge? This blog explores that qu...

From Celestial Shadows to Quantum Shadows: Learning Patience from Astronomy “We are like children playing in the shadows of a deeper reality.” The Ancient Quest: Astronomy through Shadows For thousands of years, humanity built its picture of the heavens not by seeing the true motions of planets and stars, but by watching their shadows on the sky . The ancients observed retrograde motion — planets looping backwards against the stars. They noted brightness variations — Mars sometimes blazing, sometimes dim. They tracked uneven planetary speeds , eclipse irregularities , and later the phases of Venus . But they only had the sky as their canvas, and their theories struggled to keep up: Geocentric circles (Aristotle): elegant, but failed to explain retrograde and brightness. Eccentrics & epicycles (Apollonius, Hipparchus, Ptolemy): clever adjustments, predicting motions with accuracy but artificial complexity. Equant points : mathematical fixes to match observation...

When a Wobble Could Lose a Spacecraft: Nutation and Voyager’s Lesson Imagine this: Voyager 1 , humanity’s farthest emissary, is streaking toward Jupiter in 1979. The mission relies on a perfect gravitational slingshot . But if engineers had ignored a subtle “wobble” in Earth’s axis called nutation , the spacecraft could have veered 34,000 km off target —a miss wider than Earth’s diameter! That tiny 9-arcsecond tilt would have spoiled the flyby, denying Voyager its path to the stars. What is nutation? Nutation is a small, periodic oscillation of Earth’s axis, riding on top of the grand 26,000-year precession. Caused mainly by the Moon’s tug , its strongest cycle lasts 18.6 years , nudging our planet’s tilt by mere arcseconds . To the naked eye it’s nothing. But for star catalogs , telescope pointing , or spacecraft navigation, it’s everything. Why does it matter? For astronomers, nutation corrections ensure that when you aim at a star or planet, your telescope is truly locked on...