A group for co-ordinating some Year 2009 activities related to Astronomy, in India, and where possible, in collaboration with other groups around the world.

The group is also functioning as a friendly "Ask an Astronomer/Educator" chat room.

One of the interesting activities emerging from the group interaction is the "Taare Sadak Par" program of quantifying light pollution, through simple star counts. The ongoing star count observations are interspersed with daily interactions amongst the group members to allow better accuracy of observations.

This program is using the star count method for limiting magnitude determination, as recommended by the IMO site and, also looking into all other possible methods of quantifying light pollution, through collaborative observations submitted by anyone interested.

Please do join hands with us.

Some useful groups discussions are grouped under various topics and are archived here
http://nehruplanetarium.org/IYA2009/yahoogroup/ask_an_astronomer.htm
and here
http://nehruplanetarium.org/taarewiki/pmwiki.php?n=Site.ArchivedDiscussions

[The Starry Night on the Rhone, by Van Gogh, whose photograph adorns our group page, contains the stars Alioth, Alkaid and Cor Carolli that form the boundary for region 16 mentioned in the IMO website.]