Welcome to the month long moon challenge. It is a simple task. Just look at the moon every day. A few of us are promising to do this every day and also in turn to find out a lot of other interesting facts about the moon and astronomy. It will be of course great fun if you could join in. What's better is that you can do this from the safety of your home. A big hello to everybody from across the world. I am Samir Dherde from Pune India. I work at the Interunia City Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and I'm joined by my team of the Outreach Group and a lot of astronomy lovers in this particular challenge. Of course today we are facing a bigger challenge, a bigger crisis in which we are all playing our little roles by staying at home. We are doing this to avoid disaster. Frankly speaking, I am bored of my mind by staying home. Yes, that's a reality and I'm sure you are getting bored as well. So we thought let us take a challenge. It's a very simple challenge and it involves nature all along us. Let us this month spend a little bit of time taking a step back and observing nature. As an astronomer, I love looking at the sky and therefore I thought maybe we could take up the challenge of looking at the moon for a month. It's not a big amount of time or a big amount of investment that you are making here. So all that we ask is for you to step out every day and look at the moon. I figured this season, during this month, the weather would be quite good in most places across the world. So this is a good time to do it. Of course in our rush times we have forgotten about nature. We don't really realize that the very important things by time for example are actually based on units which are based on the cycles of things happening in the sky. What is like the moon and the sun are quite important in our lives. They were well known to our ancestors who had given fantastic mythologies and lovely names to all of these. Today of course we know them by the simple scientific names mostly but all of you realize that they are part of our tradition. The moon for example is known by so many lovely names. Selim, Bulan, Chandra, Changi, so many names that it has across the world. However, how many of us can actually claim that we know the moon as good as our ancestors? In our whole connected learning of these days, we have kind of stopped individually relating to information about nature. Simple things like the moon, the sun, the movements across the sky may not be so well known to us. Well I'm not complaining. I'm just saying let us use this time that we have to look at it. It is a lovely simple activity and I'm actually going to do it with my immediate family. We are going to look for the moon of course every day but I plan to also observe a bit. This is going a bit more than looking, simply looking. In the observations I would probably try to look at what time am I looking at the moon? Right. Where am I looking at the moon? Is it in the west? Is it at the east? Is it north, south? Maybe just check. I'm going to look at what is this distance from the horizon. You know we can look at distances in terms of angles. So how far is it from the horizon? What is it's rising time? What did I see it rising? Did I see it setting? What are the times of these? Maybe I'll even make a table out of this. Just to note down these things every day throughout the whole month. I might even try to look at it through a binocular or my small telescope. I'm sure this will be fun and it will be fun activity to do every day for a little bit of time. If you do happen to have binoculars or telescopes, why not consider sketching the moon? See this lovely sketch is by Galileo. Yes, the first man to look through a telescope towards the moon. And he could make these sketches. So why not you? And I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun doing this. Of course, if you're not satisfied with these, you could go for photography. You see this lovely collection of some of the phases of the moon. Maybe you could try to do all of them and collect all the moon pictures together to form your own moon calendar. And this is an animation that you could also go for. Or the pains this person must have gone through to put together this lovely way of the moon changing. So starting this new moon, our friends are going to record a lot of pictures which we would love to share with you. We would do a detailed analysis of these pictures, look through all of them and see what are the beautiful features on the moon that we can spot. If you yourself miss looking at the moon any of these pictures, don't worry, you can always come back and visit our YouTube channel to get what fun we had the previous day. So don't forget to subscribe to this to get your updates. We will of course always be giving you nice tidbits like this to add into the fun. So be with us for the moon challenge all through this month. I'm sure you will enjoy it so much that you will do it for one more month and then one more and again and again. Well, don't worry if you also miss any of this, the moon is always there and you can always do this challenge again. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel so that you can get details about every day. I will be back tomorrow with details about the first day which is the new moon. You will in fact not be able to see the new moon. So we will discuss what is the specialty of this particular day. So looking forward to day one and looking forward to having you all back here. This is something today signing off.