Merak Dreaming

^{With a steady tripod, long exposures and a few other tricks, photographers can take images of star trails, showing the motion of the stars over the sky during a period of minutes or hours. Often, the camera stays pointed at Polaris resulting in circular star trails, but I chose to point the camera towards the eastern horizon. The resultant trails show the ecliptic, an imaginary line on the sky that marks the annual path of the sun. It also clearly shows how the stars rotate in opposing directions on both sides of the ecliptic. The image was taken atop a small hill overlooking the sleepy town of Merak on Pangong Tso. One would think the area is heavily light polluted but that is not the case as most of the lights are from cars forming trails of light on the ground. The area boasts of Bortle 1 skies and is one of my favourite locations for astrophotography. The image consists of 900 frames taken over the course of 8 hours., from dusk to dawn.}