Mumbai's Midnight Exodus: How Stargazing is Helping Residents Reconnect with Nature

On a terrace of a Parel complex, Shahid Khan is waiting for the city to vanish. Khan, the 45-year-old managing director of a supply chain company, is not looking for a quiet place to take a conference call. Instead, he is hunting for comets. Armed with a telescope and a childhood passion that refused to die, he has spent the last three years tracking the movement of planets and star clusters from the heart of the urban sprawl.“Last weekend, I drove out to a dark-sky spot in Lonavala, with a few friends to watch and photograph the Milky Way,” Khan says. “Here, I’m lucky to have access to a high terrace in my apartment complex. We often gather there to watch meteor showers, planets, and star clusters, and I even managed to watch and photograph a few comets from there.” He also manages a WhatsApp community of 300 enthusiasts who treat a meteor shower with the same reverence others reserve for a cup final. As Mumbai grows upwards and outwards, its residents are, increasingly, recognising what they are losing to light pollution and construction dust. They are, thus, trading fancy dinners for “pitch nights” in the wild, driven by a desire to take in the night sky.The midnight exodusFor financial advisor Pratik Kamble, 37, who lives in Vikhroli, sitting on his terrace and gazing upwards, “is akin to time travel,” he says. “Stargazing delivers a state of Nirvana and mental peace because you disconnect from the digital world, and connect with the universe.”A week ago, Kamble joined a group of community enthusiasts, Stargazing Mumbai, in Bhandardara for an overnight vigil that began at 7 PM and ran until 4 AM. “Astro travel and cosmic photography events happen at night so it’s easy to make time for this hobby,” he says. “It was so interesting to know the mythological stories from India, Japan, China, and Greece behind all stars and constellations. I observed layers of Jupiter and four moons of the planet. We saw many galaxies, too.”Many other Mumbaikars now block out new-moon weekends months in advance, venturing to places like Hanle in Ladakh—home to one of the world’s highest observatories at 14,500 feet—or the Rann of Kutch. For those who cannot make the trek to the Himalayas, locations like Panchgani, Lonavala, Bhandardara, Shillim, and Dehene Village have become the preferred spots to catch a clear glimpse of the Orion Nebula.High-tech huntRashi Choudhary, 33, a travel enthusiast and resident of Andheri East, has been chasing the stars since 2021. She recently attended the Rann Utsav’s stargazing festival in Kutch, where the serene new moon nights offered crystal-clear views. She says it’s for everyone, and you don’t need some NASA-sized budget. “You need a telescope, but sometimes a lot of star clusters and Nebulae are better visible through binoculars anyway,” Choudhary says. “When you want to photograph, a smartphone and a tripod or a DSLR work best.” A beginner-level telescope may cost between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000. A pair of decent binoculars is available for Rs 1,500 or more. An advanced-level telescope costs onwards from Rs 50,000, she estimates.This accessibility has made it a family pursuit. Amruta Shenoy Walwaikar, a 37-year-old healthcare professional in Goregaon, found the city too cramped for her eight-year-old daughter, Araina, to appreciate the scale of the universe. They boarded a Cordelia cruise ship to experience the night in all its glory. “My daughter was ecstatic to see the moon, stars and constellations through the telescope,” says Walwaikar.Fighting the orange hazeHowever, the hobby is not without its frustrations. “Rampant construction around Mumbai brings with it dust and light pollution—both of which affect what we can see of the night sky in the city itself,” Khan explains. “So, we must time our sessions carefully.” The improvisation has become part of the ritual: checking lunar calendars, tracking cloud cover, chasing darkness like it is a destination in itself. And yet, the appetite has only grown. Online communities fill up faster than they can organise meet-ups; Rs 499 buys you not just access to a telescope, but to a shared sense of perspective. Incredibly, you see, they have rediscovered a light that the city’s chaos can’t quite extinguish.