This image of the Milky Way holds a special place in our memory. Not only because it's so beautiful and unique view of the Milky Way. Not only because of the backdrop of Mount Saraswati with the Himalayan Chandra Telescope, one of the most prominent telescope of India.

This was a single shot captured in the middle of the night, in pitch black darkness. We had roamed around Hanle throughout the day, visiting MACE and HAGAR. We then waited for darkness and shot many photos of the night sky and visited one of the homestays where all the tourists had gathered for telescope viewing. There we had a nice interaction and shot a lot of good photos of the Milky way too. After 11:00 the sky really became better because the power was cut off. About an hour later when all of us were tired and sleepy, We decided to go back to our guest house which was about 20 minutes away, far outside the village.

As soon as we came near the shooting point of this image, at the foothills of the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, we saw the real beauty of the bortle one sky. Our guest house was still far away and we had to cross a small river. And as you can imagine, it was very, very cold. But I decided to stop the vehicle and gathered enough courage to get down for few minutes. I had to quickly set up and focus the camera and could only take a couple of shots of 10 seconds. And this is how we got this beautiful view of our milky way.