Success is not a 100 m dash but a 42 km Marathon. And to win this marathon we must better ourselves than what we were the previous day. This is the attitude the Department of Physics carries and it can be seen in this year’s VIBGYOR, the Annual Physics Festival of the Department. 2019 marks the 50^th anniversary of the Moon Landing. To celebrate and honour this giant leap for mankind, we decided to have Space and Astronomy as the theme of VIBGYOR this year. When we say celebration we don’t mean celebration behind the walls of the College. VIBGYOR is the festival of Physics and it was the conceived to popularize Physics among masses and Schoolchildren. So naturally we have tradition to invite School students to visit our festival.

We celebrate this festival for two days. On the first day, 1^st February 2019, we had an inaugural lecture on interesting topic of “Contacting Alien” delivered by Arvind Paranjpye, Director, Nehru Planetarium. On same day we had Prof. Mahesh Shetti to talk on “Contributions of Women Astronomers”. It was an eye opening talk. Seeing the contributions of the likes of Dr. Margaret Burbidge, Dr. Jocelyn Bell, Dr. Annie Jump Cannon and many more ladies were awe – inspiring. It was much needed talk in today’s socio – political environment. On second day, i.e. on 2^nd February 2019 we had a talk on an issue which is as devastating as Pollution and Global warming but not heard by many. The issues of “Space Debries”. The talk was delivered by Dr. Abhay Deshpande of Khaagol Mandal. The talk surely made students and also teachers aware about this clear and present danger looming over the earth.

In this festival student could see the working model of Mars Rover. Student from Second Year BSc and MSc built this rover from scratch. This rover could detect the obstacle within 50 cm and could do course correction to avoid the obstacle on the go. It was fully automated and not controlled remotely. Needless to say it was among the most visited display.

Replicas of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, ISRO’s Astrosat, G – Sat, 3D mapping etc. drew people’s attention. Several other displays like demonstration of Kepler’s first law, invisible pencil, Stefan’s law were quite informative. We had series of posters showing evolution of Telescopes, from optical to X rays. Replica of the Jantar Mantar Observatory piqued the curiosity of the visitor. We are sure students must have taken an immense volume of information with them.

Every year department tries to bring some novelty to the celebrations. We had things like 3D shows and Star Dome in the past. This year was also not an exception to this. This year Students of the department under the guidance of the teachers made two documentaries. One on the Hon. Ex. President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and one on Moon Landing. Both the documentaries were highly appreciated by students and parents.

The celebration concluded on 2^nd February 2019. It was a grand success. None of this could have been possible without the hard work and dedication of more than hundred student participant and volunteer. We take this opportunity to thank them all.