Telescopes of India Tour

Wishing one and all a Happy New Year. In the coming year, 2009, we will be going on a tour of some of the observatories in India. The trip can, perhaps be best described as a pilgrimage to the Holy places of astronomy in the country, with a connection to the heavens! I like how that snugly fits the description. So, without much ado, here is the list of observatories I plan on visiting, subject to their approval: 1. Indian Astronomical Observatory, Hanle 2. ARIES, Nainital 3. DU Observatory 4. Mt. Abu Observatory 5. Girawali Observatory 6. GMRT, Narayangaon 7. Osmania Univ Observatory, Hyderabad 8. CREST, Bangalore 9. Ooty Observatory 10.Vainu Bappu Observatory, Kavalur 11. Kodaikanal Observatory In addition to going there physically and adding pictures and videos, I would also like to take the oppertunity to adding information related to all these observatories on various online sources - Wikimapia and Wikipedia. The entries on Wikipedia especially are deplorable. Updates on this blog ...

First of all, I'd like to clarify that this tour is now being backed by SEDS India . It's an organisation that I have been leading for the past 4 years now and we're under the process of registeration. Now that, that's out of the way, I have been getting quite a response to my yesterday's blog post and emails to several mailing lists that I have been on - Manoj Pai from Confederation of Indian Amateur Astronomers (CIAA) wrote in with some words of advice. I really appreciate that. I got a reply from Halit and Bijal from Space Generation Advisory Council asking for any help in communicating with IYA teams. Svetlana Shkolyarfrom the 4Frontiers Corporation wrote to me. They've developed packaged tours for visiting space centres in the US . On the page, they've also mentioned about doing something similar in India, with ISRO. They've offered to do something similar in the US. It's an exciting prospect and I will definitely give it a thought. Vikra...