A glimpse of the Milky Way in Spiti Valley
Catch it if you can¹.
It’s late July but the night is freezing. I am bone-weary from a seven-hour morning hike in Pin Valley, Himachal Pradesh and a rocky three-hour drive to Kaza, but I cannot retire to bed just yet. I have the Milky Way to capture. And only a few hours to do so. I have been waiting for a clear night such as this one — cloudless, moonless, crisp and dry — for a week now while we toured from town to town taking in the awe-inspiring spectacles of Spiti Valley. Nestled amidst the Himalayas, at 13980 ft above sea level, with its desert climate and utter remoteness, the town of Kaza is probably one of the best places on the planet to capture the night sky. And tonight you can see the thick band of glowing light — the Milky Way — with your naked eye!
I am absolutely alone. It’s just me, the mountains, the stars. I plunk the camera tripod on the gravelly edge of the road. The road is empty. The sky above me is black — a deep inky black seen only in the edges of the civilisation. And it’s peppered with stars. Millions and billions of stars glittering like diamond dust. I have been transported to a new corner of the world, a celestial abode, Indralok?
Something happens when you see a starry sky. I have never seen anything so tremulous, vast and alive. It humbles you. It’s almost a religious experience. Perhaps it’s why the ancients were more god-fearing than the modern, the rural more religious than the urban — they see the stars. Millions of them. They are reminded each night how vast the universe is; what tiny, microscopic-nanoscopic specks we humans truly are; living in the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy, a pin wheeling disk composed of 200–400 billion stars like our sun. And the Milky Way is just one galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the universe!
Photographing the night sky is challenging. It demands travel to remote locales, long prayers to the weather-gods for a clear sky, buying expensive lens and DSLR cameras and lastly bodily endurance for those long nights in freezing temperatures; but when you get that click, it’s all worth it. With a long exposure, the camera sensor picks up millions more glittering stars (invisible to naked eye), it picks up the cobalt afterglow of twilight, it captures the nebular gases. Pure sorcery.
Before me extends a low hill velveted in green grass, blanketed black in the night. A lonely street lamp illuminates a monastery on the crest of the low hill. Its red-blue-green prayer flags flutter in the wind around it. Behind the hill is an enormous mountain ridge, snow-clad, alive and awesome with the nebulous gas of the Milky Way sky emanating from each ruck and tuck of its craggy surface.
Catch it if you can. Capturing the Milky Way is tricky. Capturing the phantasmagorical moment flickering around me is impossible. My first picture — taking 13 seconds of exposure time — looks great at first, but when I zoom in, the stars are blurry.
I switch on my headlamp readjust the tripod and change the settings of my camera to manual focus. Just then, I hear a truck on the road, barrelling down upon me. I grab the camera and hurriedly move out of the way. Civilisation interrupts. It breaks the spell. I replant the tripod, I refocus the lens manually, I click.
In photographing the night sky, while the stars and the Milky Way should dominate your image, it’s the foreground that anchors the composition. The monastery, the Buddhist prayer flags, the lone streetlamp and the velveteen grass anchor mine. Finally around 1AM, I am done. I pack up and I collapse in my bed.
The next morning we leave for Chandra Taal, a crescent shaped lake, at 14100 feet altitude — even higher, and with no human habitation except a campsite. It is renowned for its magnificent view of the night sky. I salivate at an opportunity to capture the night sky, the Milky Way, the millions-billions of stars against the back drop of the crescent lake.
But it was not to be. The clouds suddenly came out and blanketed the sky, it poured all day, and not a single star was to be seen. The present, the moment, it is all we get — it is fleeting, and fleeing, and gone — we need to seize it, live it as purely as possible and only then we get a glimpse of the magic, perhaps capture a wisp of it for posterity. Catch if you can.
[1] Ode to “The Present” by Anne Dillard.
