SHOOTING THE SKY IN LADAKH

The window to shoot the Milky Way was a narrow one, between 17-21 June-taking months of planning. But shooting in the dark, and in freezing weather, is not easy

- Rishad Saam Mehta

Hello darkness, my old friend/I've come to talk with you again.

Simon and Garfunkel may have been singing of people's inability to communicate in their evergreen song from the 1960s, The Sound Of Silence, but I found myself seeking out and making an appointment with darkness earlier this year. For darkness would be my one true friend when it came to photographing the Milky Way, something I had wanted to do since I first visited Ladakh in the early 2000s.

It took months of planning because my window to shoot the Milky Way was a narrow one, between 17-21 June, when the galaxy would be at its brightest best and there would be no moon in the sky between sunset and sunrise (the illumination of the moon is a sort of light pollution). I could not do it anywhere in the vicinity of Leh because lively Leh now shoots light through the night like a shiny disco ball. It was to Zanskar that I headed, taking a route from Manali to Jispa, and then peeling away from the Manali-Leh road at Darcha to climb the mighty Shinku La and descend into Zanskar. In the desolate reaches of Zanskar, where tarmac, tourism and lumens are yet to arrive, the darkness is complete.

After experiencing our fair share of frost, falling rocks and heavy snowfall at Shinku La, we arrived in Zangla, 25km from Padum, the district headquarters of Zanskar, on 18 June. Zangla is a little village where people are happy to sleep early; it is usually "lights out" by 9pm and this suited us well because that was the day of the new moon, and the Milky Way would be visible from 7.50pm to 3.24am.