This is from a trip last week to Khichan and the Desert National Park in Rajasthan. We were staying the night at the Khurja Resort at Khichan, the Polaris was perfectly positioned, the moon not expected to be on this side of the sky and I thought that the resort in the foreground would make for a nice frame. Perfect invitation for another star trail attempt.

I made my first attempt at around 8pm, expecting nothing to come out of it because of the ambient light pollution in the northern sky from a nearby town. While I couldn’t really see the final results stacked up, I knew from the low star density captured in the frames that my hunch was right. It wasn’t quite a wash-out though.

So, I set-up the camera a second time around 11:30pm and programmed it to start capturing images at 1am, hoping that the ambient lights would be at their minimum. The idea was to try and capture 360 frames, each of a 30-sec exposure with a gap of 2 secs between the exposures and I expected that this would be competed at about 4:20am. Unfortunately, I didn’t budget for the batteries running out after the 302nd exposure. C’est la vie.

The lack of star density in the bottom half of the frame is due to the impact of the light pollution from the lights from the nearby town. Didn’t come out too bad though, don’t you think?