MOON
02 February
I awoke to the sounds of owls on my balcony. They come here often, perhaps they recognize me as their own. It was 11:40 pm when I woke up, half an hour late than I would have liked to.... but rather insignificant for my purposes. I peeked out the window, the sky was clear. Meaning I wouldn't have to go back to my slumber tonight. I went to the balcony, to set up my camera, but when I opened the door, my body shook violently from the cold air outside. In my excitement I had forgotten to bring my coat, an all to common occurrence for me. I often seem forget to forget the fact that I am not in the humid Mumbai anymore, but in the freezing foothills of the Himalayas.
I had moved here a couple years ago, got get away from the glitz and glamour of society. I had always preferred to be left in my own company. But the need to make something of myself overwhelmed my wish to be alone when I approached my mid-twenties. I saw an opportunity in the rising demand of national and international companies to get custom software for their various purposes. I assembled a team of similar minded computer programmer and formed a company. One which become one of the largest IT companies in India. After a while, about 7 year later, A different passion took over me, a passion for photography, astrophotography specifically. I sold my shares of the company to my partner and left Mumbai. I needed to quite and isolated place, as the bright city lights would block any and all light except the moon from space. This place that I was looking for happened to be a lone town amidst the foothills of the Himalayas, Sundarbagh.
Currently, I grabbed my coat as quickly as I could, not wanting to lose anymore time before the sun rose. I got my camera and attached it to the end of my telescope. I got on my laptop and started the long process of tracking the moon and capturing many photographs in order to stich together a full view of the moon. It was nothing I hadn't done a dozen times before. In fact, today I was working on my project to capture the whole cycle of the moon. I was early in the project... 5 days in. The last 4 days had gone exceptionally well, and I expected this to turn out similarly. I set everything up and went to make some coffee. This was my daily routine. As I wanted to capture photographs of various celestial bodies, I had to be present when they were. The locals called me Nishachar or one who stays up in the night. I did not know it was to mock me or just a nickname.
When I got back with my coffee, I saw that my computer had crashed. I set aside my coffee and scrambled to get too my chair. I restarted my computer to see that perhaps it had saved the first few images and that I did not have to start over again. It had saved some images, a minute or two of footage. Towards the end I found that the camera had stopped tracking the moon and instead had lagged slightly behind the moon. Since these images were pretty much unusable, I went to delete them, but Suddenly a sense a curiosity took over me and I decided to look through them. They were what I had expected. But then I noticed a little smudge... perhaps a distant galaxy. But that was impossible, I knew the night sky of this region like the back of my hand. I knew of all the galaxies that my telescope could capture and had captured a good number of them, but this seeming popped out of the sky.
I was overtook with excitement. Had I discovered a new galaxy that was perhaps hidden from us because of the brightness of the moon? I was already thinking of names for it. Then the voice of reason inside my head chimed in. I should not get excited, perhaps it was a smudge on the lens, an optical illusion? I went to check the lens and got my various book in order to find out if it was a trick of the light or an already discovered galaxy. What I wouldn't have given have an internet connection at that instant. Yet after hours of shifting through the pages, I could not find anything. The sun had already begun to rise up, and there was no prospect of getting more pictures at this point. I also had to buy groceries, I had barely enough left. I deiced that today I should buy groceries and other things. I would spent the whole next night capturing picture of this object, and then the day after tomorrow, I would go contact the nearest observatory, the 3.6m Devasthal Optical Telescope or 3.6m DOT and try to get access to their large telescope.
03 February
The next afternoon I found myself in my bed trying to force myself to sleep. I felt too excited to sleep, But I knew if I didn't sleep now, I would inevitably fall asleep at the most crucial moment. I had made this mistake enough times to know that it was extremally important to sleep now. I set my alarm to 9:00 and closed my eyes, searching for sleep. I woke up at 8:45, before the alarm, I got myself a coffee quickly and opened the balcony doors. The cold wind blew across my scarcely dressed body but I barely felt it. I attached my camera to my telescope and configured it to that spot that I had the object in yesterday. To my surprise, it was gone. I felt like I had been cheated. This was an error after all... still I looked near the spot. I could find nothing. I was sad, but felt like I shouldn't waste the night. So I went to focus my camera on the moon. I still had a project after all. But as I shifted my telescope, I saw something that I could never had anticipated. the object seemed to have moved. it was closer to the moon than the previous night, but the moon was in a completely different portion of the sky than yesterday.
This ruled out the possibility that this was a distant galaxy, since this was not physically feasible for a distant galaxy. I now had to play the guessing game again. It could be possible that this was a comet, since it had a kind of tail. but in order for it to cover such great distance, either it would have to be very close to the earth, or moving with a great speed. I was delighted with this discovery. I started to flip through pages of my books to find if this comet was already discovered. I left the camera running. After some time, when I went to check the pictures my camera had caught, I found that the laptop had once again crashed. I immediately tried rebooted the computer, but to no avail. The computer wouldn't respond. The machine was pretty old, and being in the cold winds of the Himalayas hadn't done it any favors. I usually kept backup of every night of footage, but in my excitement I had forgotten yesterday.
I decided that the best course of action would be to contact the people at 3.6 m DOT, and inquire about it. I ran towards my phone, but suddenly stopped, remembering that it was closed today and that there would be no one on the other end at this time. I had memorized their schedule, since I often found myself trying to contact them. I also needed to fix my laptop. But a laptop repair would take time, and I didn't know if I would get another chance to capture the object, if it was a comet. I decided that I would take my old laptop to try and get the data back, and in the meantime, buy another laptop. I was still full of energy, because I had just woken up one and half hours ago, but I had to wait for daytime to do anything. If only my owl friends were of any use.
06 February
The last three days have been quite eventful. So much so that I didn't have time to update my journal. I am currently sitting in the town library, and contemplating if I am crazy or not. Let me try to jot down everything that has occurred while my memory is still fresh.
I was awake the whole night, when the clock struck 9:00, I knew that the observatory was open. I called immediately. A familiar voice answered the phone, it was my friend, he worked at the observatory. We had met a few years back in Mumbai. Our passion for astrophotography and space brought us together. He was a native of Sundarbagh and suggested the place when I expressed my desire to move to a quite place to pursue astrophotography. He was also a big fan of folklore, another trait we shared. Since he was brought up in Sundarbagh, he was quite familiar with the local folklore, a topic which would often fuel our discussion for hours. He didn't sound very excited when I called, I was a bit a of an annoyance. I asked him if they had captured a comet or something like it the day before yesterday and if they had any idea of what it was. He replied that they had a technical difficulty that day and couldn't capture anything. I was disappointed, but I was hopeful as my friend reassured that they would try to capture it that night.
I prepared to make my journey into town, my home was a little isolated and on a slight hill. I got my laptop and money. The town had not computer store, So I had to travel several kilometers to the nearest city to get to the store. I arrived home late at night, though I had been awake for about 24 hours, I still had some energy left. I connected my laptop to my camera and focused on the moon. I started looking near the moon. I had some trouble finding the object, but I did find it at last. I was looking at the images being captured when I realized something, the tail of the object had reversed. Furthermore, the object seemed to slow down. Just then, my computer crashed.... again. I panicked, and got up and on the balcony, detached the camera from the telescope and looked through it with my own eyes. focusing on the space near the moon, I tried to find the object but was unsuccessful. It just disappeared.
At this point, a suspicion popped into my mind. Can it be that the camera was malfunctioning? perhaps it had some fault in its software, it was a digital camera after all. I was still determined to capture the object on camera. Restarting the computer I found that the images had not yet been saved in the hard disk and were lost. I tried multiple times that night to capture the object, But was ultimately unsuccessful.
The sun arose the next day, I arose six hours later, about 12 o'clock. Today I made plans to meet my friend at the observatory, and also find books on comets. I had books on galaxies, stars, planets, nebulas etc., but not comets. I arrived at about 4pm at the observatory, an hour before closing. Meeting my friend I inquired about the object. He said that they found no such thing the previous day, or the previous week. They captured what they had expected, nothing out of the ordinary. My friend seemed a little anxious, so I asked him what was eating him. He told that in Sundarbagh, he had often heard of the legend of the 'Krishtarakam' or the dark star. He was caught up in his work, so he suggested that I visit the nearby library to read about it. The library was not for off, and had a adjacent hotel. When I went to pick up the recovered data of my old laptop, I heard on the radio that there was a chance of a storm to occur that night. It would take me at least 2 hours to get to Sundarbagh in a cab, like I came here in the afternoon, but since no cab driver in his right mind would choose to travel when a storm is forecasted, I had to stay the night here. I checked into the hotel near the library, and since I had no appetite for sleep, I decided to read about the folklore that my friend told me about, the Krishtarakam.
I entered the library and got to the folklore section. There was a huge bookshelf in front of me, filled with tons of books. It would be impossible for me to look through all of them. Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a book, labeled 'Famous folklores of Sundarbagh'. What a coincidence, As I flipped through the pages, I read about all types of demons and monsters. Some I already knew about thanks to my friend and neighbours. I spent hours looking though them. Halfway through the book, I found the legend of Krishtarakam. At this point I had completely forgotten that I came here to read about this in the first place. The legend fascinated me, and I have tried my best to remember every detail and recall the legend below.
Long ago, when Sundarbagh was know as a home to the saint of ancient India, there was a learned saint, known as Amritnath. He had a hunger for knowledge which granted him immense knowledge and power. His fellow saint started noticing something odd about him. Every night Amritnath would say a prayer to the moon. This new practice bothered and confused the other saints and they set out to find what was the meaning behind it. They found that Amritnath believed that the moon held the ultimate power of the universe and whoever held that power controlled the universe. They found that Amritnath had planned to take this alleged power for himself and rule the universe. While the other saints found it absurd, they also recognized that Amritnath was power-hungry, and that someone as powerful and knowledgeable as him would lead to no good result. So the other saints caught him by surprise and trapped his soul in a huge black rock the flung the rock to space. Now Amritnath wanders the darkness of space, every year getting very close to the moon in the winter months, but missing his target. The legend tells that Amritnath waits for a host, a host who can be enchanted by the mystery of the Krishtarakam. Amritnath would then try to take control of his body, using his powers to change the world around the host in order to draw him closer, to make the host bridge the mental gap between them and take control of the body to act on his sinister plan once again.
As soon as I finished reading, my mind got filled with excitement. I could see why the object reminded my friend of this, the familiarity is uncanny. And I believed that in fact, this legend was the local people's way of describing a phenomenon that they had been seeing for centuries, perhaps even millennia. I now had historical proof that the object was in fact, real. At least it was proof to me.
I got up and went to my hotel room. Just before I entered my room, a staff member approached me and told me that there was a call for me. I went to the front desk to pick up the call, it was my friend. I hadn't told him where I was going to stay, but seeing as this was the only hotel in the area, he must have guessed that I had checked in here. He told me that at the observatory, they had just captured an image of an unidentified object near the moon. I was ecstatic and asked him if I could come to the observatory. He stopped me saying that the weather was getting worse and that I should stay in the hotel. HE wasn't wrong, in a few minutes the winds turned and blew with great velocity. The sky that was shining with thousands of stars some time ago was now covered with clouds. I slept soundly that day.
The next day when I woke up, the weather was fine, but looked like it could worsen, so I wasted no time and got a cab. After reaching home, I decided that my first course of action should be to check the recovered data on the hard drive. I connected the hard drive to my computer and stated to look through the pictures of 2nd and 3rd February. The pictures were there on the hard drive, to my relief. But there was something off, the object was nowhere to be seen. I looked through every single image but could find nothing. I felt as if someone was playing a prank on me. But there was not much to be sad about, the observatory had captured the object the previous day. I went to call the observatory, since it was now about 10 am. But to my disappointment, I found that my phone was not working. On asking the neighbours, I found that the telephone line had been cut, presumably due to the bad weather. I felt a sense of emergency. for the past few days, ever since I discovered the object, I had been feeling a kind of paranoia or uncertainty, and it was at an all time high right then. I rushed to the cab that had taken me here and said to the driver that I urgently had to go back. The driver was confused, but he did not deny me.
After I reached the observatory, I found my friend outside the building. he looked distressed. I asked what was the matter, and he said that the observatory was struck by lightning the previous night and that the storage room was completely destroyed. Seeing the building behind him, there was not a doubt in my mind about the fact he just told me. I asked him if the footage of the object had survived. He looked puzzled and said that they did not capture anything like that the previous day and even if they had, it would have been destroyed. I thought he was joking with me and asked him about the phone call. He said that he did not make any such call. Without saying anything more, I rushed towards the hotel I had stayed at the previous night. The receptionist greeted me. I inquired about the phone call made yesterday for me. She said that they received no calls for tenets that day, and proceeded to show me a written log of phone calls, she wasn't lying. At this point the mystery and confusion had started taking its toll on me and I felt my chest racing. For some reason I went into the library. I sat down and started recording everything in my journal, this journal. I have a terrible feeling that someone is deliberately causing these events; but who? Who can change things already done? I don't know, I may never know. I feel that I have done something that I don't yet understand.
I am leaving this journal in the library for now. If I return, I will continue this entry. If not, this for someone else to find.
