Imaging Earth and the Sky Above It

India’s Kutch region offers a combination of unique landscapes and dark skies.
credit: Soumyadeep Mukherjee

India is home to some unique (and magnificent) landscapes spread across the country. This time, we travel to the extreme western parts of India to explore some of the ancient landscapes of the country. One of the biggest perks of doing astrophotography is to get a chance to explore these exciting places and photograph them. The Kutch region in Gujrat, India, is home to one of the largest salt flats in the country. In addition, the region offers a couple of dried river beds with rock formations curved by a once-flowing river. Due to the limited resources and low population in the region, the skies are dark and perfectly suited for stargazing and astrophotography.

The landscape in Kutch

The Kutch region of Gujarat is a geological wonderland, home to some of India’s most striking and prehistoric landscapes. The area is dominated by the vast Rann of Kutch, a seasonal salt desert that stretches like a white canvas. It offers an otherworldly terrain shaped by tectonic shifts and climatic extremes. Although it is a popular tourist spot in the daytime, the nights here offer uninterrupted sessions under the stars.

The Jatavira region, home to a dried-up river bed offers another opportunity for astrophotographers to travel back in time. Fossils and sedimentary patterns around the site indicate a time when the area was part of a dynamic river system, long since dried up by geological upheaval and climate change. The dry river bed stretches for a few miles in the region with interesting rock formations at every step.

Not far from here lies Kadiya Dhro, a dramatic gorge carved into soft sandstone, rich with ripple marks, fossilized roots, and sediment layers that reveal the Earth’s history like pages in a book. Together, these landscapes — shaped by shifting seas, vanishing rivers, and the slow grind of time — make Kutch a unique confluence of natural beauty and deep-time geology, offering an immersive journey into Earth’s distant past.

The field experience: changes, compromises

The skies in the Kutch region are dark, dark enough to do full-fledged astrophotography. However, during the few days of my tour, the visibility was not ideal. The stars, especially near the horizon, were barely visible to the naked eye. While I planned to capture Milky Way images and deep skyscapes, the conditions were not perfectly suited for these. In early March, when the Milky Way rises a couple of hours before dawn, I was forced to wait and let the Milky Way rise a little higher in the sky. The haze in the sky along with a little amount of light pollution from distant villages and towns made things worse.

I carry two setups on my trips. Out of those two, one remains dedicated to tracked astrophotography (wide-field nightscapes, deepscapes and deep sky), while the second setup captures star trails. This time, however, thanks to the not-so-ideal sky conditions, I had to engage both for star-trail photography from the beginning of each night’s session. Although I managed to capture a few Milky Way images over the five nights, almost 60 percent of my images turned out to be star-trail photos.

Experiments with long exposures

Due to the sky conditions at Kutch, I had to resort to taking more star trail images. Although it seemed like a disappointment initially, capturing this many star-trail images turned out to be an amazing learning opportunity. For someone like me, who had always kept such images sidelined to work on tracked astrophotography, this tour allowed me to experiment with several techniques. One of those experimentations included taking single long exposures to create a star trail image. Nikon’s latest mirrorless cameras offer an in-camera option to take exposures up to 900 seconds (15 minutes), without an external intervalometer. I tried this option for the first time during one of my dark sky trips in late 2024 and promised myself to revisit the technique extensively. The Kutch trip turned out to be a perfect place for this.

These images, what I prefer to call “slow-cooked” images, turned out to be a great option, especially when you don’t have any images planned. Running out of ideas in 8-to-10 hour-long sessions is common and these 15-minute images are a perfect way to give yourself some time to come up with an idea, all the while creating another image. I tried experimenting with panoramas with 900-second exposures and also tried involving the crescent Moon in some of these images.

Utilizing the Moon and moonlit landscapes

Another first for me on this trip was to do astrophotography with a crescent Moon in the sky. While it had its drawbacks, less opportunity for deep-sky images and fewer stars visible, it came with a unique opportunity: photographing moonlit landscapes. On all my previous trips, I haven’t had the opportunity to photograph the night sky with the Moon. It came to me as a surprise how bright a crescent Moon can appear from a dark location.The landscapes turned into a magical world in the presence of moonlight.

The light-painted landscapes were a perfect time for star-trail images, both in long format (2 to 3 hours) and short format (15 minutes). While the Moon is seen as a not-so-good-friend for astrophotographers, it allows a lot of unique opportunities.

The presence of the crescent Moon also allowed images of moonset. On the last day of the trip, I saw one of the most beautiful moonsets I’ve ever seen.

A few more images

Altogether, the tour was special. The sky conditions, and the Moon, together offered me moments of magic and excuses to try different things. Also, when my cameras were busy taking photos, all of us would lie down and watch the stars. Those were the most memorable moments.

Here are a few more images I was able to capture during the Kutch trip.

If you have created an image with moonlit landscapes and/or utilizing the 900-seconds (or longer) shutter speed, share them with us at readergallery@astronomy.com.

Clear skies!