My telescopes
Manmohan Chodhury
Telescope mania had gripped me when I was about ten years old , back in 1924 or 1925 . Our neighbour had a set of the Book of Knowledge of which I had become an avid and regular reader. As I did not go to school , my father was having noncooperated , I had enough time to myself and a chance to savour the wide world opened up by the set of children's book. In it I came across instruction on building a telescope , a 2 inch one . In the book it was very simple : you get hold of a 2 inch objective with a focal length of 24 inches and a smaller one for the eyepiece , roll a cardboard tube and fix the lens into it and the telescope is ready. But on the ground it was not so easy.Cuttack was then a very small town with a population of about 50,000 and there of course were no science shops. One day I set out with a family friend , who later become a leader in the freedom movement , in search of of the lense. There was only one optical shop in the town and of course they had only lenses for specs.
Later on I got hold of a broken magnifying glass and a smaller lens out of some other gadget and built a telescope with a cardboard tube out of which i and my friends had hours of fun watching terrestrial objects. the fascination of the skies had not yet hit me. Of course when I was a child my father used to show me the constellations when we would be resting on the rooftop on summer nights before going to sleep. I had vague memories of them and their names. Later in the 30s I got hold of books on astronomy and popular tracts by Jeans Eddington and other scientists as by then I had begun to wonder about the nature of the universe we were living in. These books whetted my curiosity about the wonders of the sky, but by then the cardboard telescope had been lost. The only wonderful object I could spot with my naked eyes was the galaxy In Andromeda.
Thereafter the yearning for the telescope lay dormant for fifty years or so till I visited the US in 1984 where the mania re-surfaced. I caught hold of a book on telescope making and then acquired a 6 inch mirror , a diagonal and an eye-piece. I built the telescope when I came back to Cuttack with the help of local artisan. They and I had to overcome innumerable snags that faced us as we went ahead with our own plan adapted to the materials available locally. It was a great day when the scope aws ready and I could see the mountain on the moon, the Orion nebula, the Andromeda galaxy, the rings of Saturn , the four moons and the dark bands of Jupiter and the crescent of Venus. then I started hunting for the spectacular galaxies, nebulaes star clusters and other wonders of the sky.
AsI needed a bigger telescope to see the outer planets ,Uranus , Neptune and Pluto, I decided to build a 12.5 inch telescope and have built it with the opticals procured from abroad. This was a more demanding task than i had expected to be., the snags multiplying in ratio to sqare of the diameters of the mirror , but the successful completion of the project has been greatly satisfying.
The Bhagavat Gita describes how Shrikrishna revealed to Arjun his cosmic self- Vishwa Rupa-and gave him supernal or transcendental vision so that he could perceive it. Today the microscope and the telescope are the two instruments that provide us with glimpses of the cosmic self , of the grandeur , beauty and mysteries of the microcosm and the macrocosm. when I look , through the telescope at some distant galaxy , may be ten million light years away and of which light takes a hundred thousand years to reach from one end to the other, I have vision that places our terrestrial existence in proper prospective and make worries , tensions , and fears melt away. It gives me a kind of spiritual experience that lifts me out of mundane life so that I can pursue my other activities with renewed zest. I relies why poet Rabindranath Tagore sang : The sky is full of suns and stars and life fills the earth. It is in the midst of this that I have had my birth. And so songs spring from my wondering heart.