I'm a 21 year old engineering undergraduate student who has been interested in astronomy from when I was
in high school. I live in Kodanad, a village in Kerala, where I get Bortle 3-5 skies on a consistent basis.
There was even lesser light pollution when I started astronomy, thanks to the lesser number of buildings
back then.
I learnt many of the constellations with the help of printable planispheres from skymaps.com.
Most of the deep sky objects plotted in the map was out of my reach back then. The Sky and Telescope website
was also really useful to get to know current astronomical events and other such interesting information.
After a while of naked eye observations, I got myself a pair of binoculars, which instantly made stargazing a whole
lot more exciting, revealing more details in objects like the Moon and even some deep sky objects like the Orion Nebula.
I still remember the first time I saw the Pleiades cluster through my binoculars. I was so blown away by the amount of detail that the
small binoculars revealed. (It was later once I got a telescope did I realize that some objects look better at smaller magnifications). The
small patch of light in the sky that was the cluster, maybe resolvable by the naked eyes as a group of 4-5 stars forming a rhombus under dark skies
immediately becomes evident as an open cluster of stars shining in a striking blue. This was one of the experiences that really
got me hooked into astronomy.
You can contact me via Twitter or by email at sreeramvenkitesh [at] gmail [dot] com.
The code for this website has been made open-source at GitHub. Clear Skies!