The Lyrid Meteor Shower¶
One fine day, I find myself invited to a meteor-shower viewing trip. The details were still undecided but it would involve a bike ride of about 100 kilometres one way. In order to view a meteor shower, we need to get out of the city-light-pollution.
I took some time to confirm my plans. I was getting the pre-trip cold-feet when a friend kindly stepped up and helped me navigate those (thank you). Now that I had committed to the trip, I decided that I would carry my coffee-making equipment on the trip because why not!! It turned out to be a good idea.
I am very apprehensive of riding the bike in the night. I do not enjoy driving in the night. The world is not too visible (everything is dark) and all I can do is drive. Riding in the night feels weird especially on empty roads because I don't have anything to look at. I get distracted. This would be my first significant driving experience which would begin and end at non-daylight-hours.
Slowly and steadily the route was decided, the things were packed, and we were on our way.
The Journey from Bangalore¶
We started at around 11 ish in the night. The first leg of the journey was within the Bangalore city limits. We were going to stop at a checkpoint near Hebbal and pick someone up. By the time I reached there, I could not see the others. My pillion and I decided that it's best to not wait for the others as in all likelihood, they were all ahead of us. (I ride at party-pace :P) This was a good idea as we all caught up to each other at the next stop. This was a Jio-BP petrol pump close to the Decathlon near the Bangalore Airport. A friend in the group was in need of some rubber band and tape (electrical tape) etc and to my surprise, no one in the petrol pump had any tape at all. I ended up asking for some cello-tape from a truck-driver who was parked nearby. (note to self: carry cello-tape and rubber band and zip-ties). A friend introduced me to the joy of consuming chocolate dipped in warm coffee. It was divine.
The restroom at the stop was mildly clean. Overall, as far as petrol-pump restrooms go, Shell seems to have the cleanest ones.
At the suggestion of a friend we decided to share our live locations with each other. And this is how I discovered that you can share your location with another person on Google maps. You can see how much battery they have left. (technology is great) This location is somewhat less realtime as I would soon find out later.
The ride after this was mostly uneventful, except for the fact that I took a wrong turn. I keep doing this. I am bad with maps (only in cities, especially at night, especially in highways).
I have new-found respect for the motorbike and its headlights. During some of the darker sections of the ride, once we were sufficiently outside city limits my headlights were bright enough to light up the road quite intensely. I kept switching off the headlight just to see how dark it really was. This was a new experience for me.
At the location.¶
We reached the spot at around 2:30 in the morning. This place is known for being an active sloth-bear location, hence we didn't go too deep into the forest. In fact we didn't even go to actual picnic spot. We camped somewhere in the middle of the trail that led to the camping spot from the road head. It was dark enough, even though it could have been a bit more dark.
I didn't realize how bad the light pollution is in the cities when I first started the bike ride. By the end of it, we were about a 100 kms away and somehow the light pollution was still there.
Here comes the METEORS¶
At the spot, we lay on the ground and started looking up. I had picked a nice comfortable section of the sky that I was looking at. Very soon, we started seeing a bunch of meteors streak by. At the road-head we did see one very large meteor which got all of us very excited. This was my first time seeing meteors. I was very happy.
THERE WERE SO MANY STARS.
As the large meteors passed through, they tore the skin of the sky open; the skin stayed open for a short while after which is closed on its own.
I kept wondering about what / how our ancestors might have felt when they saw this same event millions of years ago. It must've been scary for them, to look at the sky as it was being scratched by big flaming balls of fire. On a cosmic scale, the timelines are tiny. I wonder how long the earth has been scratched by the same meteor. If the atmosphere were a skin, then it would have a lot of scars.
The Journey back¶
The night was cooler than what I was prepared for. We decided to leave early and not wait for the sunrise because we didn't want to get caught up in the morning traffic in the city.
This was a good excuse for me to break-out my alcohol stove and prepare a large batch of coffee. :)
We left as soon as the coffee was consumed.
The ride back was beautiful. For a while I could not believe that we had ridden through such beautiful landscapes; then I recalled that we had ridden the entire journey in the night.
We passed by the Gudibande fort. I stopped and stared at it for a while. The sun was coming up by this point. We decided to stop and stare at it. It was the first live sun-rise for a friend. Watching that young explosion rise from the horizon never fails to amaze me. It fills me up with a warm kind of joy.
this was the sunrise. taken from between the trees.
We rode for a while and then I made a stop to have some tea. We were still 1 hour away from the city, when we realized that the other group had already reached the city.
The rest of the trip was okay. I lost my other friend for a while in the city traffic but I was able to find them and catch up thanks to the location sharing. It was a nice game of chase while I was trying to catch up to them.
What I've learnt¶
- Riding in the night is still isolating, but I am not scared anymore.
- Sunrises are beautiful and I like them very much.
- Gudibande fort is pretty
- Meteors are also very pretty.