Devendran P belongs to a family of sungazers in Tamil Nadu who have kept alive the family tradition of daily studying the sun and making observations for over a century now. Daily, in the morning darkness, he trudges to the solar observatory situated on the southern hill town of Kodaikanal. Once inside, he opens the windows of the dome by pulling a rope and with the help of a six inch telescope, he photographs the sun and records its daily activity.

Devendran is of the opinion that the sun, like other stars has a life of 10 billion years and if we want to know about any small changes, we need to have large amount of data.

R. Ramesh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics that runs the observatory said that it has a key role in providing a continuous stream of data on the sun and its influence on Earth and surrounding space. He said that some of the discoveries made, based on data obtained in the Kodaikanal observatory, are so fundamental to solar physics that they have contributed significantly to improve techniques used in observatories even today.

The library at the observatory contains shelves with volumes of handwritten records and thousands of film plates of the sun. In order to preserve the data collected over the past century, authorities have launched a project to digitise the entire data.

The observatory at  Kodaikanal, situated more than 6,562 feet above sea level, offers an ideal weather to study the sun. Devendran's grandfather, Parthasarathy, joined the observatory in 1900. The family has no formal education in astronomy. A visit to the observatory as a child stirred great interest in Devendran and he became a full time sunwatcher.

His 23-year-old son, Rajesh has a master's degree in physics and wishes to carry on the family tradition.