The starry sky...

Well, from the past few days, i have been spending most of the time after dinner on the terrace of the building, so that i can stay away from the heat of home. And soon, i got obsessed with seeing the stars. I am not talking about getting into astrology stuff, but i rather found this an interesting way to spend time. (waste time actually!! hehe)

The first and most obvious thing you'll see as soon as you look up is The Plough. I carefully observed it, but i couldn't make out the stars around it to complete the Big Dipper constellation. And after some research over the internet, i got a certain idea about the positions of the stars. But hold on !! it's never the same!! What we see on diagrams is almost always flipped or inverted and it gets so damn difficult to make out the positions in the real sky. It gets really frustrating to keep your head up all the time and search in vain... To add insult to injury, our great city ranks well in pollution levels. The effect of the day's pollution can be seen clearly at night with a orange-red glow covering the whole sky, and the lights from below being reflected to prove that. As a standard, we must be able to see about 60 stars without moving our head. And what i can see is about 6-8 stars, and that, after straining the eyes. Well, I don't wanna complain coz, i am really enjoying it...

I managed to find some interesting things over the internet and i get excited to see them out there in the blackness of the universe. Some of the things i would love to be able to see are, Leo, Orion, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Canis Major and Minor, and a few more like Taurus. But before that, we need to find this so called Winter Triangle and the Winter Hexagon which has among the brightest stars like Sirius, Betelgeuse, Pollux and stuff.. I have been having a faint idea about the location of Sirius coz, it is the brighest star and also forms a vertex of the Winter Hexagon, and, it forms the constellation, Canis Major, but the problem is, i can't confirm it. There's a bright thing in the east the surely is Jupiter, and there are 2 brights above my head of which, one is Mars and the other might be Sirius. Just can't confirm...

The skies are cloudless, but are extremely polluted, and this problem is only mildly solved by my binoculars. I really hope we pollute less and return our sky to its natural blackness at night (and help me find my stars more easily!!). Infact, i am going to Vishakapatnam and Chattisgarh on 21st, so i think, i am surely gonna find the skies a lot better when viewed in Chattisgarh. The places are pollution free and also almost 600m above sea level. I hope i find what i want then...