Will the stars align for astro tourism in India?

Astro tourism combines astronomy and tourism, wherein travelers engage in activities like stargazing, watching the planets, peeking into other galaxies, watching eclipses, and more

“I think I have seen Saturn and its rings like a million times now, but each time I see it, it's a novel experience that I cannot explain,” shared Sonal Asgotraa, former electric engineer from Punjab who now runs Astro Stays. It is a community based astro tourism venture in Ladakh which educates and provides resources to women-led homestays in village Maan, 6 kilometres from one of Ladakh’s most popular tourist destinations Pangong Tso, to hold astronomy experiences for the guests along with sharing the local cosmological wisdom and heritage of Ladakh. 

“I grew up in a small village in Kerala where we had really clear skies; you could see the Milky Way! I also used to see pictures of galaxies, nebulae and clusters when Hubble started releasing them. It always fascinated me a lot—what is outside Earth,” says Navaneeth Unnikrishnan, an astro-landscape photographer from Kerala who now captures spectacular images of celestial bodies and events from across the world. “What you photograph looks very different from what you see with the naked eye,” he says, adding that a clear night sky is “something we need to witness at least once in our lives.”

Asgotraa and Unnikrishnan share a basic curiosity that a lot of us have—about what lies beyond this rock we call Earth. Stars, planets, moon, sun, eclipses, nebulae, the Milky Way and entire galaxies are now closer to us than ever, thanks to advanced technology, awareness and access to visuals from beyond. Now, Indian travellers can see the sky a lot clearer, thanks to the advent of astro tourism in the country. 

Astro tourism combines astronomy and tourism, wherein travelers engage in activities like stargazing, watching the planets, peeking into other galaxies, watching eclipses, and more. While this niche of travel has long piqued the interest of tourists worldwide, with popular sites such as the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in New Zealand, Rhön Biosphere Reserve in Germany, La Palma and Tenerife islands of Canary Islands, Pic du Midi in France and the Atacama Desert in Chile being some of the most prominent that draw crowds, both amateur and well-versed astronomers and stargazers, in India, it’s a novel travel trend that is quickly gaining ground.

Astro tourism in India

In March 2022, Rajasthan became the first state to launch a night sky tourism initiative by installing high quality telescopes in all its 33 districts, besides the existing stargazing venues including Jantar-Mantar, Amber Fort, University of Maharaja and Jawahar Kala Kendra. As part of this initiative, various events are organised every month at different locations in Jaipur, according to the placement of the celestial bodies. “The decision to set up these telescopes would help promote science, astronomy and night sky Astro tourism in the state. People keen to read the stars and the sky can visit Jaipur and other districts to enjoy the night tourism,” Mugdha Sinha, Secretary in the state’s Department of Science and Technology told PTI in a statement.

Soon after, in a landmark movement for the union territory’s tourism industry, India’s first dark sky reserve was opened in the Ladakhi village of Hanle in collaboration with Indian Institute of Astrophysics, thanks to its zero light pollution and dark night skies. Later in August, Uttarakhand’s Benital, perched at 2,600 metres above sea level, was declared India’s first astro-village with a dedicated observatory equipped with telescopes and other astronomical instruments. Astro parks have also been developed in Mandu, Madhya Pradesh and Haldwani, Dehradun. 

Long before any of these facilities came up, an observatory in Kausani, Uttarakhand was holding both day and night sky shows. This was set up and started by Starscapes, founded by Ramashish Ray back in 2015. What started out as a passion project with co-founder and CEO Paul Savio soon catapulted into a leading venture in the astro tourism space in India with observatories in Ooty, Bhimtal, Mukteshwar, an astro camp in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, as well as in Club Mahindra properties in 30 locations across India to facilitate sky watching. Explaining the motive and Starscapes’ essential business model, Savio says: “We’ve made astronomy more accessible to the masses by taking away the hassle and entire setup period where you have to pick a place to go to, plan the equipment, research what to see, when to go, take permits for equipments, etc., which is a huge entry barrier for anyone new to these. We are taking care of it all by opening up observatories which are way more accessible by bringing them closer to you. Now you don't need to go to Ladakh, for example, to have a great stargazing experience. Of course, it's definitely going to be much better than what you'd get in, say, Goa, but you can still have a great stargazing experience in Goa itself. We want to give people that first experience of the skies.”

Why the hype?

But why the sudden interest in the great unknown amongst Indian masses? Savio believes that “it's the next big thing for our species. And I'm not saying the way we've been doing it till now. I'm saying actually going up there, settling there, running businesses, having hotels, and not just tourism, but also settlements in the celestial bodies. You have private enterprise getting into space travel right now and costs of going to space are becoming drastically lesser because of innovation. In India, there was so much awareness and excitement about the Chandrayaan mission, also thanks to social media. Now that the conversation around astronomy and space is so frequent, stargazing basically becomes your gateway drug to this whole thing.” Asgotraa also credits organisations like the International Dark Association “which has been working hard against light pollution in dark sky reserves, parks, et cetera, and raising awareness”, besides pop culture catalysts in the form of recent movies like Gravity and Interstellar for the rising interest in astro tourism. 

If you live in a city, you’d be hard-pressed to see anything more than the North Star, unless you own and know your way around a telescope. That’s why, one of the prerequisites of identifying a place fit for sky watching is, among other things, low light pollution. Savio explains that primarily, you need a dark sky, and the definition of that is quantifiable to a large extent using the Bortle scale which is a nine point logarithmic scale of the amount of light which the sky has at that space. Nine are the inner cities, like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, among others. Savio added that for the Starscapes principal observatories, “We look at only locations which are five or less. So Jaipur, for instance, is five because it's quite bright. But Kausani is two; Madikeri, just outside the town, is two. Most of the other locations are three or four. You go to Ladakh, it's one. In almost all cases, the accessibility and the darkness are inversely proportional, for obvious reasons. Because the moment you have accessibility, you have settlements coming up and light comes in. Like Kausani, for instance, is 10 hours from Delhi whereas Bhimtal would take you five. But Bhimtal is four and a half on the Bortle scale, and Kausani is two. So Kausani is darker because it's also more difficult to get in.”

For Deepanshu Nihalani, a 30 year-old solutions consultant at PriceLabs, a revenue management platform for vacation rentals, his curiosity about the universe piqued early. “Since school, all I wanted to read about was the universe. I would buy encyclopedias to get myself more familiar with everything related to space.” His first experience of witnessing the glorious night sky was in Jaisalmer in 2016, on a work trip. “I was spending the night in the desert, and it was pitch dark and a new moon night. I looked up and I couldn't look back down; the amount of shooting stars I saw that night, I lost count. I saw the Milky Way, the cosmic dust across the sky, and I was hooked.” Now a digital nomad and an amateur cyclist, Nihalani says that even though he hasn’t solely travelled to a place for sky watching, he always makes it a point to look for dark skies wherever he travels, especially in remote areas.

Both Asgotraa and Savio’s observations concur. They shared that even though more and more people are interested in astronomic experiences, they are yet to witness tourists travelling to their respective facilities solely for a sky watching experience, indicating that even though on the rise, astro-tourism is still embryonic. “Right now, we don't really have astro-tourists. People are tourists. They're coming to a certain place and they're discovering new experiences. Sky watching happens to be one of them,” says Savio, echoing Asgotraa’s statement: “So far, I've not seen anyone who has come to Ladakh only to visit our Cosmo Hub or just because of Astro Stays. They are in Ladakh and they have come to know about us from somewhere and hence, visited. We've got a lot of tourists like that.”

According to Asgotraa, astro tourism could be one of the keys to bringing socio-economic benefit to remote and offbeat areas who haven’t benefited from the exponential tourism in Ladakh’s popular tourist destinations. “Because these experiences require dark skies and the obvious vantage point for that is areas that are offbeat, the economic benefits are extended to such areas.” Asgotraa also notes  that astro tourism has the potential to “enable tourism dispersal to avoid concentrated tourism in few centers which lead to overcrowding and management problems.” 

While excited about its promise, Asgotraa, operating out one of the country’s most fragile and delicate ecological regions, is cautious of a possible flip side. “More people coming to remote areas definitely means more infrastructure that needs to be required to either house them which means light pollution, which is counterintuitive to what we are talking about.” She is also of the belief that the government’s current approach towards promoting astro tourism “lacks a holistic vision; it's just a very momentary thing where they'll pick up on a trend and promote it,” adding that “on ground implementation includes identifying a destination, people who are going to run that project or that implementation on that particular site, training them, and doing a market linkage, because you can create that beautiful destination, but if travelers are not coming, it's not going to be sustainable. That whole cycle is very important, which I think the government is really lacking in.”

Despite challenges and hurdles, both Starscapes and Astro Stays report a definite growth with “an increased number of interested people visiting since the pandemic”, according to Savio, further bolstering his prediction that “conversations are going to be around space from now on.”

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