By: Ramprasath Rengasamy

If it was not that costly, the people of Ohio could have been given each a powerful camera, which on that particular day could have helped them capture that bright thing that drifted across the blue sky and succumbed to ashes and never touch the ground.

The local channel‘s announcement that claimed the bright thing to be meteor was enough to most of the people of Ohio to convince themselves and return to their usual day to day chores ignoring what they saw in the bright sky.

Little did anyone know about the NextStar sky telescope that 15 years old Steven was hiding from others in his attic. Thanks to his dead mother and nowhere-to-be-found father. It was their absence in his life that brought him a room in the attic which was the most convenient place from where he can get a clear picture of the sky.

Right after the burn-down of the meteor, what he saw in his telescope chilled his spine momentarily. There was a prominent dot seen in the sky, which when magnified appeared much similar to a planet. He was surprised because as far as he knew, there was no chance for a planet to exist at that part of the sky. He had complete catalogues of planets and stars but the planet he saw was not there in the list. The very fact that, any new siting of a planet will most likely end up naming the planet by the name of the one who saw it first, excited him.

The benefits were mouthwatering. He could be given a huge sum as prize money. He could be offered a decent course to pursue in a good university and on completion could even get a job at a research unit with a good package. Not only did he dream of himself giving technical speech about modern astronomy to a bunch of scientists and researchers from across the world but he also dreamed of visiting to countries on international conferences.

With much eager, he quickly noted down the co-ordinates of his new finding and took his computer and sent out an email to the NASA explaining his finding. In that email of his, he marked his full name bold, italic and underlined.

As he waited for a reply from NASA, after almost 30 minutes, there came a reply from NASA in his Inbox. He double clicked it to open and

“Please clean your telescope lenses periodically” was all written in it.