думать.simple: Trip to see the stars.

Because of my driving itch, we made an impromptu plan to escape Boston on Saturday night and go to some place where we could see the stars. This has been, for some time now, a dream of mine---ever since I saw a clear sky in Aspen, I've been wanting to go to a place where I could truly see the Milky Way. And luckily Saloni buys into this dream.

Light Pollution map around Boston (lower right corner). The first bit of purple is where Mt. Sunapee State Park is.

A light-pollution map we found on the web showed that Mt. Sunapee in NH is the closest place in Boston to a truly dark sky; well, darker than Aspen anyway. Mt. Sunapee is just about an hour and a half drive from Boston, although I could care less about the drive time :) We quickly hashed up the ideal plan: 0) Buy torchlights. 1) Reach Mt. Sunapee by 9 PM. 2) Park the car and climb up the Summit by 11-ish PM. 3) See the stars, photograph them, whatever. 4) Climb down and sleep in the car, or, my pick, "Dexter's Motel" (going with the eerie-night theme). (More on the serial killer reference later on.)

I asked for an economy sedan and but since AVIS was out of economy sedans, they gave me a much larger premium sedan: a Chevy Impala. This wasn't a good thing actually because, as it turned out, this car sucks. Not that the Subaru Legacy or Chevy Cruze are amazing, but the Impala just has no muscle whatsoever. I felt like I had to murder the accelerator to maintain speed climbing up the hilly highways in NH. The transmission felt like it was always lagging behind. (Apparently this isn't too uncommon with automatic transmissions; drivetrain losses are much higher and the actual torque on the wheels can be much lower than the manual version of the same car, see link! Besides, it almost feels like a handicap to not be able to change the gear when you hear the engine moan.) And the car had only ever run 7500 miles. That said, the drive overall was OK. It was clear weather all the way and the people in this part of the country were more cautious about the speed limit. This meant that I never felt forced to drive much above the speed limit. But it also meant that we often came across slowpokes who couldn't drive 5 mph above the speed limit and had to be constantly overtaken. But this, I enjoy.

No lights, anywhere.

Spookfest.

Back to the actual trip. When we reached Mt. Sunapee, things got a bit complicated. There's a very long winded road with a max speed limit of 15 MPH that drives you to its gates. It is absolutely unlit and it doesn't help that at that time of the day, the place is almost entirely deserted. You cannot see any signs because the roads don't have reflectors and this made everything more confusing. I even ended up driving on the wrong way for a minute (on this super slow road) or so before turning back.

Anyhow, we managed to find a (fucking huge) parking lot in the State park. It was also super eerie. Again, imagine begin in an area where the human density is like 1 person every 1000 acres of space. And then you see an empty trailer. And you shit your pants, maybe just a wee bit. The whole idea of being in a nearly deserted mountain forest with a primarily (at least, in my imagination) white population was driving me a bit insane; probably because the only previous experience I had had of this kind of a scene was from watching serial killer shows. (I must say, I create an eerier atmosphere in my own imagination just to get a kick out of the whole thing.)

Since we didn't feel like venturing out so much, we drove higher up on a unpaved road until we found another tinier, and also empty parking lot that seemed to be at the apex of where we could go with our car. Now, in an ideal world, we would have got out and hiked up the summit in the pitch darkness. But honestly, it just didn't seem like a safe thing to do; there were all kinds of animal sounds, at some point I even heard a woman shriek from god-knows-where, and so we ultimately decided that it didn't make sense to do this in the night unless we'd done the hike in the day time once before so that we knew what to expect from it. And so we got, and ventured just a little bit to see if we could get some nice images of the stars.

North Star, possibly?

Big Dipper. 15 second exposure; Aperture f1.8.

And, sadly, we really couldn't see the stars so well. I mean, yes, there were a bunch of stars, but you definitely could not tell how they shaped the Milky Way. The real downer was that, of all the days we could have come to this place, we came on a full moon night. This is a complete no-no for star watching. The only things we managed to see was the North Star (ughh) and the Big Dipper (ughhhh.) But we still learned something! When you look at the image real close, you realize that one of the stars in the Big Dipper is actually 2 stars. (In fact, they are totally 6 stars that grouped into 2 chunks that from the naked eye look almost like just 1 big star.) When we searched about it online, we realized that in ancient Indian astronomy, these stars are known as Vashishth and Arundhati; representing a man and a woman; and one of the things they say in Sanskrit during the Hindu marriage ceremony (which we mostly don't understand) is that a husband and wife should be close like these two stars. Sweet! We then ended up feeling too lazy (and cheap) to go find a motel so we slept in the car. It was actually a pretty decent sleep surprisingly.

Waking up in the deserted Mt. Sunapee.

Getting breakfast.

In the morning, we woke up at 8ish, got breakfast, went not the hike that we were supposed to do in the night. The peak had a nice view of Lake Sunapee. We were too lazy to go beyond the peak to this hilly lake called Lake Solitude. It looked pretty good in photos, and with a name like that, I should've been more into going there, when I come to think about it. Nothing like a bit of solitude and a good smoke (ah pleasures which I sadly cannot enjoy anymore).