How the Milky Way looked to me from Ladakh

As a child, you must have read about the Milky Way in your geography books and must have, at least once, tried to spot it. Living in New Delhi, there's little or no scope for people to look up at the night sky and see the dance that the stars enact in the dark. Coming from a small town where pollution did not hide the stars, I was eager to head out to a place where I could see them. My daughter's curiosity about the galaxy only egged me on to head to Ladakh with my family.

Ladakh, with its beautiful, cold, dry deserts, is the perfect place for those interested in shooting the Milky Way. On June 16, 2015, when the camp's lights at Pangong Lake went out at 10pm, I was all set with my camera. The lake by itself had no attraction for me. All I wanted was to look up at the sky and see the stars and the Milky Way. By 10.30pm, when my eyes had properly adjusted to the dark, I looked up and noticed a dull, grey cloud rising from a hill and spreading in an arc above me. The Milky Way had risen. That's when I began shooting. I spent nearly two hours looking up.

Here are four of the photos that I took. Each photograph is a composite of between five and ten long-exposure photos: