Star Trails from India from Ajay Talwar on Vimeo.
This time-lapse video was created by astrophotographer Ajay Talwar by assembling 8,198 images shot over 104 hours at six locations across India.
It's a painstaking effort. An eight-hour session of photographing the stars generates approximately 960 images. When all of these images are assembled together, they only create about 40 seconds of video footage. "Generally speaking, shooting enough footage for a seven- or eight-minute video can take years," said 49-year-old Talwar.
Talwar's journey to the heavens started in 1986, when he was a hotel management student in college in Kolkata. A trip to observe Halley's comet got him hooked on astronomy and he soon turned to astrophotography.
"Astrophotography was a choice that I decided upon because it was difficult and there weren't many people doing it," he said. "I took it as a challenge. The process has become much easier now, though back in the days when we were still using film cameras, correcting any mistakes would easily set you back by about one or two months."
When he isn't taking his own pictures, Talwar conducts astrophotography workshops in a village in Uttarakhand called Majkhali. He is also working with the Madhya Pradesh Council of Science & Technology to set up the Dongla Observatory in Ujjain.
For his next video project, he will be shooting time lapse pictures of the construction of India's largest telescope at the Devasthal peak in Uttarakhand's Nainital district.