Happy Birth Day Samanta Chandra Shekhar (Pathani Samanta)
Saturday, December 20th, 2008Yesterday was the 173rd Birth day of Samanta Chandra Sekhar, we fondly call Pathani Samanta, the great astronomer of Orissa. We really salute the brave soul, who exactly calculated the height of the mountains on moon by just two bamboo sticks, without having the facility of telescopes.

Samanta Chandra Sekhar
As an amateur astronomer, I was really surprised to know that he calculated the Sunrise and set time with error of just 0.0005~0.003 seconds during my project work, which is really unique in the world. All the other methods aren’t able to give such a high accuracy. He really had a superb geometrical analysis power. You will mostly find his instuments made up with sticks that tells us the exact location of solar eclipse whrever in the world.
I want to make some thing very proudly clear: Samanta chandra Sekhar is the first man in the world to strongly support that it is the center of mass (or gravity) (of a two body system) around which both Sun and Earth is revolving rather than sun moving around earth or earth moving around sun, which was misunderstood by other astronomers as the geocentric hypothesis. Whoever has a doubt plese go thro’ “Sidhhanta Darpan” book. Or, plese visit:
http://www.geocities.com/uuphy2000/psbipin.PDF
Later most of his research was moon oriented and he discovered so many anomalies of moon, the height of mountains and depth of creaters on moon, with naked eye with very high precision. Only error around some meters.
I’m very much proud that I used his calculations for my project and got some unsolved answers which I could not solve by modern methods. I used the satelite imagaries for one and half year and concluded that Pthani’s formulla is the most error free. For him only I was able to finish my 10years’ work in 2 and 1/2 years. My research article will be published after the completion of phase two.
The only thing he will teach you, budding enterpreneurs, is that have a strong determination, nothing is impossible, even though you have shortage of resources.
The above picture is collected by me from SCAAA (Samanta Chandra Sekhar Amateur Astronomers’ Association, where I’m a life member). You are free to share this article or picture among others, speak about it on Twitter etc etc, You know better than me.
Folow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sanmaya

