Of Star Parties on Cloudy Nights.

Now... I know that the title of this blog post is rather inappropriate - that's because I wouldn't want to put a lengthy title like:

"Why you would want to attend a Star Party - that too - one as far away from home as it can get, when the nights nowadays are so cloudy that you could statistically expect subsequent nights to be cloudy as well."

Let me answer that question from my perspective.

Of course, as you have already figured out, this is to convince you people who registered for the BAS Hampi Trip (considering the important fact that *you will not get a refund*) that:

1. You must refrain from throwing your bricks, bats, eggs and tomatoes at Hemant Hariyani, because they might bounce back from his fat paunch. Even if they don't, he will ensure that they do return to you with atleast 2718.28 times the force.

2. You must go to the star party and ENJOY

3. You can enjoy a star party even when skies are cloudy. 

Now...

Why should I attend a star party when the skies are cloudy?

1. It's a break from routine life: And it is really an exciting way of taking a break - because it involves travel! You get to travel a lot, and if you enjoy driving, you could drive as well!
2. It's an outing: You get to travel out, see a lot of stuff, learn a lot of new things about the place you're visiting... blah blah blah
3. Amar says it will clear after midnight: Although this cannot be proved, it does happen most of the times, strangely. We all know that Amar is crazy, but somehow, this one thing that he says does work *sometimes*.
4. Weather can never be predicted: We've had several instances where it has been raining torrents in Bangalore at 3:00 PM and when we hit Hosahalli (50km from Bangalore by road - much shorter by the crow's-fly path) in the evening, the skies are WOW! Generally, skies after rains somehow tend to be more clear.
5. You get to meet BAS! Yes. You get to meet a lot of people. And many of them might share your other hobbies. For instance, anybody who's the web-geek will find Pavan to be a very interesting guy and anybody who's interested in trekking will find Chandru interesting. And anyone who's interested in getting bored can meet Amar! (Although I wouldn't know why one would want to). And believe me, there are a lot of friendly guys around like Rakesh Nath, Amar, Naveen....
6. BAS gets to meet you! Of course, you'll definitely have something interesting to share with us and we'd welcome you with open hands to the BAS group!
7. Even if it clears for 5 minutes, you get to see something: That's because Amar comes installed with this marvellous unprecedented goto-telescope software which can locate 11th magnitude objects within seconds in the telescope.
8. You can do a lot of discussion on cloudy nights: (I didn't mean the cloudynights forums at http://www.cloudynights.com/ - in which case this would've been a trivial statement.) For instance, I discuss web development / Drupal with Pavan and Amar discusses about the-nostalgic-memories-of-that-ultra-faint-12th-magnitude-fuzzy-patch-which-was-supposed-to-be-a-galaxy-we-saw-(or didn't see)-on-that-night with me etc. You can almost always find someone interesting to discuss something that interests you with. You learn a lot.
9. You get to learn amateur astronomy: You'd get to know how telescopes work, including demos of how you could project a torchlight beam into a disc on a distant tree using a telescope. You'd get to learn about the Newtonian design of telescopes, about eyepieces (and how Hemant'd get mad at you if you dropped them).

I think that should be enough.

PS: This blog post was completely on a light note and you shouldn't be considering any comments that I've made on other people, especially Amar in particular - with whom I've rather been unfairly harsh.

DISCLAIMER: I by no means claim that anything written here in this blog post is true, and wish to retain a neutral opinion towards the above statements.