The Observatory

Kodaikanal is not loaded with “things to see.” The ridge, the slopes, and the valleys are beautiful, the air is cool, and those aspects are certainly a break for the visitor from the plain below. Nevertheless there was one place I wanted to visit – the solar observatory at the high end of Observatory Road. I’d been up the hill before on another errand but when I turned off, there was hill above me and since they build observatories where there is a clear view of the sky, there was still a distance to go both horizontally as well as straight up.

After some inquiries I found I had two conflicting bits of information and while both agreed that the observatory would be open on Friday, neither agreed on the time. Now that coupled with my absent mind, weeks went by until I made a firm plan to visit. When I pay Rs. 60 to endanger my life in a taxi, I want to make sure of seeing what I set out to see and not be walking around at cloud level with nothing to look at. Yesterday (Friday January 25th) was to be the day. The cab ride up the road was pretty. We drove up the same catchment in which the lake lies, which was off to our left. The vernacular stone houses, the humble ones as well, always hold my attention. I have said before that Kodaikanal is not packed together as a flat ground town would be whether Madurai or Manhattan. Green spaces here are natural, usually caused by the impossibility of building on the grade and too there are enough institutions around to keep people from building one on top of another as you see on the plains.

Arriving at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics I signed in at the gate and walked the last kilometer to the museum. Inside the walls were covered with poster-sized NASA color prints with text. Up near the ceiling, pictures of past directors hung. The observatory goes back to the mid 1880s and so the directors’ corner was populated with men in suits from a collection of decades. In a room on the north side of the building, there was a projection of the sun on a screen. There were several visitors and the uniformed guide/guard explained several points about the sun. The problem for me is that he spoke the local language, Tamil.

Since I carried a small scope from place to place for a little over 40 years, I was familiar with looking for sunspots when the sun’s image is projected on anything clean, white, and smooth. I squinted at the image, which was probably about two feet across and I think I saw a few solar storms. I say “think” because visitors or staff had used ballpoint pens to mark sunspot locations and either permanently marked the screen surface or else no one had ever bothered to wipe off the screen. It wasn’t their job.

It must be the Year of the Quiet Sun because among the pen marks, I found very few sunspots, perhaps three or four. It may be that the staff failed to focus the apparatus. A projection like this one is not a sophisticated observation problem. I believe that it was Galileo who first projected the solar disk onto something white. Any scope or probably even binoculars will do. The biggest challenge is to prop up the scope where it won’t move but back to the mutilated screen. Had someone hung a fresh piece of paper in the screen position each day, first, you could seen the solar disturbances clearer and two, you could keep track of them by saving the paper screens with notations from days before. The sun rotates. It takes roughly a month for a full turn around and that is approximate because of the gases at different latitudes move at different speeds. Outdoors something else was going on.

I walked round outside of the museum and found the reflecting mirror that directed the sunlight into the building. The apparatus had a flat mirror which was housed in a roll-away shed on tracks. Were it to rain (and this area is subject to the monsoon,) the shed protects the mechanism that turns the mirror. I had never seen a machine like that. It measured about three feet long, about the same height, and about two feet wide. There was a small electric motor with a Watt type governor that controlled the speed of a cogwheel which was set at right angles to another matching wheel. Too often the works of a machine are covered or else the parts are moving so fast as not to show how it works; this was the exception. You could follow the twisting axle to a worm drive that engaged another cogwheel and so on until you got to the mirror that reflected a six inch beam of sunshine across the yard, through a missing pane of glass in the window and into the museum. From there the light went into a projector and onto the screen - the one with the marks from ball point pens.

After pretty well figuring out how the works functioned, I was joined by some other visitors. Since people show up in Kodaikanal from all parts of India, I don’t know where anyone was from but the only requirement in this case was that they understand English.

“Good Morning, Institute Visitors! My name is John Hallum and I am a ranger for the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. This machine you see here…..” I really didn’t do it that way but I did begin a short interpretation on solar astronomy and this machine, which could track the sun, more or less. About every fifteen or twenty minutes, a guide/guard would come out for a fine adjustment. Had I felt like I had to cook a cover story for the staff member, I could have blamed the lack of synchronization on the elliptical orbit of Earth. And how the manufacturer, T. Cook of London, couldn’t have compensated for the ellipse. But the machine was simply out of whack and an adjustment three times an hour was better than hiring a laborer to sit there holding a mirror for five hours every Friday. The visitors overlooked any design defects in either machine or lecturer. It seemed that everyone had a good time. I certainly did.

There was still some uphill left to climb and so up I went past the tunnel where, I think, they study the sun’s spectrum. I must check on that when I meet someone who has done the operation. At this observatory, there was a long tunnel off to one side. About every 25 or 30 feet there was a ventilator coming up from the tunnel. The idea being that they need to keep the air temperature stable so as not to distort the sun’s image with “heat waves.”

Even farther up the ridge stood an observatory with a dome at either end of the building, each with a scope and each for stellar study.

I decided that I wouldn’t take a taxi on the way home. The weather was near perfect and I could use the exercise. After all it was all downhill.

About halfway down the ridge, I thought a break might be good. A woman, who had never heard of the Tower of Babel, came out from where she and some others were building a house and asked me to phone someone. I must look like a card carrying cell phone operator and a Tamil speaker to boot. Finally a man dressed in a blindingly white long shirt and dhoti joined us and she took up the matter with him. She dressed in a bright and spotless sari typical of women construction workers. While his clothes were as clean as hers, he was not doing construction work because you can’t work if you keep both your hands behind your back. While these two sorted out the lady’s problem, I crossed the road to see what the growling was all about.

There was a troop of maybe twenty-five monkeys of all ages up a stand of gum trees. Their problem was that while they’d been checking out a sack of garbage, someone tossed down a gulch beside the road, they’d been joined by a couple of dogs. The dogs took over the rubbish and the monkeys took to the trees. About two limbs from the lowest on one tree sat the boss monkey. He weighed almost as much as the dogs but while he had a terrible growl, he wouldn’t come down and bite. The dogs took their time sniffing through the trash and only when they left off sniffing and walked beneath the tree, did the monkeys make an aggressive move. And that was all it was. The dogs went on their way ignoring the threat and the old monkey and the rest of the troop reclaimed the rubbish. I walked on.

The hillside offers beautiful views and the rich and poor both must enjoy living on the slope. The rich enjoy driving their cars uphill and past their guards stationed in little houses about the size of an outhouse. Somebody got busy and produced a bunch of them with a good pitch to the roof. Since the guard shacks are small enough to be loaded on a flatbed, I suspect many were built in a shop and then moved on site.

The Class A building material in the area is squared and dressed stone. Most of the villas are built with stone. A few of the villas have guard houses built to match. The yards are planted and kept up well by gardeners. Since these estates are “tipped up on edge” because of the slope, you get a good view of the grounds.

The houses of the poor are made with rubble - stone without any particular shape. Between the facing on the inside of the house and that on the outside, there is a filling of dirt. I don’t know how it works. There should be a bond between the two but…. The examples of this kind of building are never over one story. They use the technique for garden walls as well. Occasionally you’ll see a tumbled down house. Whether it was structural failure or whether the house was abandoned for other reasons, I don’t know. The guarding in the case of the poor is done by dogs or chickens. And the climb up the hill must keep the family healthy until they get to be my age anyhow. The slope from the road to the house is often steep enough to require building steps.

Several times I saw women walking down the hill with loads of firewood on their heads. The wood looked green but none of the sticks were over three inches in diameter. Green or not, being that small, the wood should dry quickly. The wood is for sale in town but the ladies could be wood gathering for themselves as well.

Even going downhill with plenty of breaks, the sun was warm enough to make me carry my jacket over my shoulder. I was pretty well dried out by the time I crossed “the bund,” a dam with a road over it. This was a privately built structure that backed up water across a swamp and formed the lake I visit several times a week. I climbed up the opposite hill to a venerable establishment called Spencer’s. It is the first grocery store I’ve found in India. Nothing flashy. It reminded me of a village store in the Alaskan bush. High ceilings and a long shotgun lay out. No shopping carts. There is not a big selection of anything but the stocking clerks were meticulously dusting and arranging their wares. I picked up a bottle of water. As it was early in the afternoon, it had been a long dry morning since coffee at breakfast. I found a place to sit outside and drank the whole liter. I walked on to PT Road and went to see my Tibetan friend. He made me a pot of ginger/lemon tea, my new addiction, and I read my pocket book, licked shaker salt off the back of my hand, and soaked up that pot of tea. After two and a half pounds of liquid, I felt better. Nothing broken, worn out, injured, and now being reliquefied I felt squared away. Tomorrow, the “Talking Library.”

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