Blawgg

Several years back I had once observed what looked like a star moving quickly in a straight line across the zenith, on a clear night in Dehradun. That was an artificial satellite, which are frequently visible (with the naked eye too in clear environs) during dusk or dawn.

Satellite spotting is a regular hobby with many skygazers. And there are websites (surprise!) that generate satellite paths on sky charts for tracking. The first google link turned out to be at hobbyspace.com – a great list of such websites. And particularly useful is a German site called Heavens-above (this link takes you directly to the satellite predictions for New Delhi – may not work in Firefox 3.0).

Using their excellent charts, I was easily able to spot Cosmos 1674 and Cosmos 2263 (that passed just below Saturn today), using an ordinary 10x binocular. The satellites appear as a small dot racing past your field of view.

If you plan to spot any of these, I suggest being prepared at least 5 minutes before – make sure you locate the estimated position and the neighbouring (well, not literally) stars/planets, and scan the area around the path at the given time.

What would be ultracool? A webcam setup with a small scope that tracks these satellites automatically and uploads the video feed on the internet.

This comet is now in Leo, near Saturn, and visible for most of the night. It’s supposed to be fairly easy to spot, given the 180 degree angular distance from the sun, and its long tails. I couldn’t find it with a 10x binocular, and a 20x refractor scope. I did look around where its supposed to be, but probably a magnification of 50x or so is required at least, to make out the hazy tail and ascertain it’s not a star. Also Delhi’s ambient city light spreads out to about 50 degrees up from the horizon, making it impossible to spot stars below 4 or 5 magnitude.

Here is a pdf showing the comet’s trajectory over the next few days: click

(Its easy to spot Leo and Saturn after about 9 PM – look east where the sun rises, then crane your neck up about 40 degrees. There should  be 3 bright stars – the lowest red one  is Saturn (well planet not star), and the top two which appear in a line parallel to the horizon are from the Leo constellation, the right one being Regulus. That’s where the comet is around (see pdf).

Here are regular followups by various astronomers  : click

There’s news about a new photograph of the Helix Nebula, that looks like an eye, and is being nicknamed the Eye of God.

The visual magnitude is about 7.6, and the angular diameter is 32.7′ – that’s a little more than the full moon’s diameter in the sky. Hence this should be fairly easy to spot with a low power telescope or binoculars – the latter are better because you need a wide field of view to capture the haziness. The low south location might make it difficult from Delhi etc due to the pollution and ambient lights in the city. Also its already beginning to set around 9PM these days so its close to the west horizon again. (By the way I don’t think you should expect to see the bright colors you see in the news pic above.)

Here’s how you could locate it in the sky.

The Helix nebula is the pink square on the bottom right. It falls in the Aquarius constellation. If you can’t find that, you could start with Orion (middle left in the pic). There’s also Jupiter in the bottom right (the last symbol, ) which is very easily spotted these days (brightest star-like above the western horizon, easily visible just as the sun starts to set).  This is a link to wikisky where you could do better to try pinpoint the location.

There are two other objects you could try – marked in squares on the top of the pic – the left one is Pleides (or seven sister, a collection of 200+ stars that appears to form a nice pattern. Easy to spot with naked eye), and the right one is the Andromeda galaxy (Need small scope).

Angular diameters on wikipedia

 50 celebrities on twitter
Yoko Ono’s ImaginePeace

Here’s one (this link directly generates the view from Delhi) – Your Sky

This is another, though far fancier: wikisky

Comet Lulin discovered in 2007, is nearing to closest approach to earth on Feb 24th. Website

Here is a rough map of Lulin’s position from the same website. It’s seen best in the morning.

The other comet is Comet McNaught. Again to be found near Venus at dusk, attained a mag of -2 which made it easili viewable by the naked eye. However it is now gone I guess.

Ambience mall, Gurgaon has a new Yamaha music store (2 or 3 floor). Guitars, Pianos and the works. Also neat demo enclosures for trying them out.

Made a trip to Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and Sariska National Park again on the long weekend of Jan 26th ’09. Turned out to be a pretty good trip, and cost effective too.

We didn’t do any bookings prior to the travel, had 3 days and were travelling by car.  We knew we had to be at both parks very early (6 am) to get in early which is the best time to go for, and also avoid missing out the limited gypsies etc available for the rides in the park.

We started off at 3 PM on the Saturday afternoon. Here’s the route we took:

There’s a CCD and Pizza Hut when you are about to enter Mathura, and just before the right you need to take to Dig (or Deeg). This right turn btw is after a junction (there’s a big green signboard on the right road at this X, towards “Govardhan” but that isnt the right right), and after crossing a flyover. It doesn’t show up in googlemaps, so the pink arrow is really a road. (Gmaps just shows a railway line all along – but thankfully we asked directions at the Pizza Hut that saved us from going to Dig in the night). This road was single lane, but newly laid, so while we were driving in the night it was OK. Plus it got us straight to Bharatpur in < 2 hours, which seemed even less since we spent most of the time debating the sum of two sides of a triangle being always greater than the third side axiom.

Bharatpur is an old town but big. You cross most of the city to reach the sanctuary. We arrived at about 8pm and somehow landed up in an area with a lot of hotels that turned out to be close to the sanctuary too.

Just a few hours before, all of Delhi had landed up in the same place too. So there were no rooms. Most of the hotels are lodge-like, with barely any facilities. After some talking we got one hotel owner to put us up in a room in a nearby hostel. There were beds, fresh sheets and a loo with running water, and it was 9pm so it was ok. (Cost – 1050Rs including an additional 3rd bed – you’d never pay that if you had options)

Sun morning we got up at 6 am and reached the sanctuary entrance at abt 6:30. Again most of Delhi had the same bright idea of being there..first. 

The good thing about Bharatpur is that most of the sanctuary is travelled using a single small road.

At the entrance, you need to buy tickets per person, for video cameras and if you want to not go on foot, you can either rent rickshaws (2 per rick) or rent bicycles (of the Atlas type, that only Sunny Deol can lift). You could use your car to enter the sanctuary, but that goes only till about 1 km inside, where you then need to park and ultimately choose foot/rick/bicycle. Also you can rent binoculars, or make sure to carry a good pair.

Tip: It’s the same if you just get a rick from outside – as the ricks are limited, we drove in and luckily found two inside. Don’t park in the general parking – instead park at the Ashoka lodge parking which is to the right after entering, because  when you return the parking will be full and it’ll be a pain to get your car back out.

Every mode of transport beyond this point travels at the same pace. The advantage of a rick is that the rick-driver is able to act as a guide and helps you spot the birds and name them.

Its’ pretty much a Natgeo experience, with all the egrets, herons, storks, kingfishers, treepies, eagles, owls and of course the sambhar and the neelgai by the hundreds. We saw about 35 species that we had never seen before live.

A few kms in, there’s a small resting place – but inadequately stocked so you’re lucky to get tea with milk and absolutely useless loos.

We rode the rick for about 2 hours in, to the point where we got a glimpse of the Siberian crane, and then turned back.

The tickets cost us about Rs. 25 per person, plus car ticket for about 50 or so, and the ricks at 50 bucks an hour with a 100 buck tip each came to 600 bucks.

We then exit the sanctuary and started towards Deeg. This is a very bad road and took us longer than planned. Deeg is supposed to have some good forts to see. There’s some dhabas on the road if you want interesting Rajasthani food.

Sariska has only 2 hotels – a Tiger Den resort owned by the state govt (very good lodge – clean and cheap and good food – abt 1200 Rs a night), and the Sariska Palace, a fancy costlier hotel.  Both are right next to the park. To book Tiger Den you need to go to Bikaner House at Pandara road, Delhi. It’s usually full on holidays. You can call them up at +91 (0) 144 2841342 to ask about vacancies.

We knew it was full, so we decided to stay overnight at Alwar enroute.  Alwar turned out to a great town – good roads, working traffic lights, light traffic and good hotels to stay in. We found a place for about 800 for the night. At Alwar, we managed to see the Siliserh lake and one more thing I forget now.

In Sariska, to properly tour offroad in the park, you need to hire Gypsies. While you can take your own car in, you can’t use it to go off road into the wild. And you can’t risk it to places like Kankwari fort – it’s all rough terrain. Plus in your own car without a guide, there are tough restrictions on getting off your car etc. Now, as the gypsies are limited, it makes sense to reach the counter early. So, from Alwar, we started at 5:45 AM on Monday morning to Sariska. The road turned out to be great – we had tea in the dark at a small dhaba – and with no traffic, made it to Sariska in about 30 mins (even saw Sambhar crossing the road on the way).

There were again people already at the windows, but we did manage to get a gypsy for the full day tour (Rs 2700 – full day means more than 4 hours. Kankwari fort alone takes about 3 hrs in all, so…)

Last time I visited Sariska in the summers – absolutely the worst time with all the heat and dryness. This time, the jungle was cleaner, greener and there was water in all the waterholes.

Again, a lot of neelgai/sambhar, peacocks, monkeys, some birds. The tiger sighting is extremely rare – but apparently just a day before the tiger had appeared on the main road where kids in a school bus got a great sighting. All we saw was a pug mark. :p This time, we did see a croc, langurs and a jackal.

Best of all – we got to see 3 lakes this time – one at the beginning on the left, one next to Kankwari fort, and one on the way out (the biggest). We returned to the first one on the way back to spot a croc basking in the sun. The other two lakes were absolutely stunning – reflecting the blue sheen of the sky – with flocks of birds swooping up and down in the distance – another natgeo moment. Absolutely something you fall in love with.

Lake next to Kankwari fort-

Lake on the way out from Sariska (near Neelam or whatsthatfortsname Fort)

Ancient temple

The temple was the last thing we saw at Sariska, followed by an hour’s journey back to the main gate. We went in for lunch at the Tiger Den, where a buffet is server after noon to about 2 PM. We managed to scrape off whatever food remained there.

Tip: While buying entrance tickets to Sariska, the guy will ask you for more money that the tickets are worth, not pay it back to you, but will adjust the change against the gypsy’s payment (that you’ll pay later) – it’ll be printed on the ticket too. But at the end of the day, you’ll forget that, and still pay the gypsy driver the full amount. So…

And so, after exiting Sariska, we joined the NH-8 and made our way back to Gurgaon. The whole trip came to about Rs 3300 per person, including fuel, hotel, tickets and food.

(Tip: One thing you’ll see absolutely everywhere, even inside the parks, are cell phone towers. So if you have a GPRS enabled phone, download Google maps for mobile application, which shows you your position without having a GPS addon. It’s great. But remember, always ask Pizza Hut for directions )

[Vasant's post on the trip]

Setting up any existing broadband provider’s modems with another vendor’s wireless router is a nerve wracking task, but the advantages of a wifi far outweigh the troubles. After having setup an MTNL trband with my Netgear WGT624 v3 and run it for almost an year, I now bought a Reliance wimax 600kbps plan, to escape the wireline irregularities of an MTNL landline.

Setting up the netgear router again was a challenge, but in the end turned out to be simpler than with the MTNL modem.

Both MTNL and Reliance require you to login – MTNL with your CA # and phone #, and Reliance with a Subscriber ID and password. Now, I don’t know what the technical term for it is – but both logins are actually different – the MTNL log in is a network level login (that doesn’t use cookies) while the Reliance thing is on the application level and probably does use cookies since you keep the browser window open. So with MTNL, when configuring a separate wifi router, you need to reconfig your MTNL modem as a bridge connection instead of PPPOe (go to admin console 192.168.1.1->Home->Wan i think).

With Reliance however, you don’t make any changes to the Wimax modem (is it even a modem.. hmm). So with the netgear console it’s much simpler. All i had to do was

1) Reset the netgear router first using the rear hidden button

2) Skip the setup wizard – go to Basic Settings (you could run the wiz too and let it detect the DHCP internet connection)

3)  Mark ‘Does your internet connection require a login’ as NO

4) Account name/Domain name doesn’t matter

5) Internet IP Address – mark ‘Get Dynamically from ISP’

6) Domain Name Server address -  mark ‘Use these DNS servers’ and put in the Reliance wimax DNS servers (you can find them in your copy of the CAF)

7 – Router MAC address – mark ‘Use default address’

8 – The Wireless settings link is up to you

9 – Click LAN IP Setup  on the left menu bar. Change the IP Address to 192.168.1.2 instead of 192.168.1.1.

10 – Tick ‘Use  Router as DHCP’ and put the Starting IP Address as 192.168.1.33 (it’s basically to avoid conflicts with other IPs.. why 33? i don’t know.. picked it up from somewhere and it seems high enough to be safe)

That’s pretty much it. Remember to save your settings by revisiting the links to check if they still persist. Also remember that Reliance Wimax needs to be turned on about 5-10 mins before you can actually use it. To do a clean start, save settings on the netgear, switch everything off, turn Reliance on, and after 5 mins turn Netgear on. After another few mins, go to your browser and login to the Reliance site etc etc as you would normally do.

Hope this works for you!