Watch the highly anticipated Perseid meteor shower in Tamil Nadu while listening to a concert

Tamil indie artist Siennor performs live at Chidambaram at an event by Starvoirs. Tickets for the Perseid meteor shower event cost ₹5,000 for a night and two days.

Musician Siennor is clear about his plans for the weekend. He is going to be all the way in Chidambaram, six hours away from the light pollution that Chennai abundantly dispenses, to ensure that he gets the perfect view of the highly anticipated Perseid meteor shower between August 12 and 14.

“If all goes well, we will be able to spot 70 meteors per hour at 4am from the place we are at,” says the singer behind the Tamil indie hit ‘Ponnira Malai’.

Under this sky full of stars, he will be performing songs — new and old — in their acoustic form because he loves singing for small, intimate crowds. “When I sing in such spaces, the music is raw. There are no amplifiers. Mukkavasi kaathu satham dhan (It is mostly the sound of air. It is overwhelming,” he says.

This is Siennor’s second such tie-up with Starvoirs, a Chennai-based startup which organises stargazing trips across the world. During his first outing with the group founded by Bhavandhi Babulal, he performed on a boat at dusk in Andaman as thousands of parrots flew over his head.

“We saw meteors which lasted between six and eight seconds. While coming back, we also encountered bioluminescence. The waves turned blue when we touched it. It was magical and helped us unwind in a world that is essentially fast-paced,” he says.

Bhavanandi who lost himself to the stars back in 2015 was a banker who inhabited this hasty world that Siennor references. Today, he curates trips to Masai Mara, Nagaland and Kodanad in Tamil Nadu, among other locations to help others catch glimpses of Jupiter and Mars amongst other celestial bodies.

To him, stargazing is now a way of life. He quit his job in 2018 and is on a mission to ensure that the people around him get to see the vastness of the night sky beyond the limitations of the pale blue dot. He has telescopes weighing between 80 and 90 kilograms in all the above locations, as he says it is hard to lug around.