A bilingual (English + हिन्दी) field handbook that takes an absolute beginner from "what is light?" to operating a real telescope and joining a NASA-linked asteroid search. 94 full-colour pages, written and photographed at the Vatsalya Space Observatory, Jaipur.

BRAHMAND — A Field Handbook of Practical Astronomy

A complete beginner's guide to the night sky, written sentence by sentence in both English and Hindi so that no reader is left behind.

BRAHMAND begins where a curious child begins — what is light? — and ends with that same reader pointing a real telescope at a real object in the sky and contributing observations to a NASA-linked asteroid search. In between, 94 full-colour pages cover the scale of the universe, why we have seasons, the Moon and its craters, how telescopes actually work, collimation and finder alignment, step-by-step operating guides for seven real instruments from a 16-inch GoTo Dobsonian to a smart telescope, planetary and deep-sky astrophotography, star-hopping by hand and by eye, and India's own astronomical heritage from Aryabhata and the Jantar Mantar to ISRO.

Almost every photograph — Saturn, Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, the Hercules Cluster, the Moon, the Milky Way — was taken at the Vatsalya Space Observatory in Jaipur, through the very telescopes the book teaches you to use.

Free for non-commercial educational use.