Undulating terrain
A walking ground
Of Latter day saints
Or are these rolling hills
The bowels of hell?
Are these walkers
The corsairs of the endless summer
Or the saraband singers of the desert?

I had to make a separate post for this.

Changeable Hawk Eagle

Some images of birds from my recent trip to Terai forests.

The names in the caption are scientific names along with subspecies, gender and age (for those I could identify)

Indian Roller

Jungle Owlet

Grey-headed Canary Flycatcher

Oriental Pied Hornbill

White-rumped Shama

Rosy Pipit (?)
Olive-backed Pipit

Lesser Goldenback

Spangled Drongo

Indian Grey Hornbill

Long-tailed Shrike

Oriental Turtle Dove

Red-whiskered Bulbul

Brown-capped Pygmy Woodpecker

Common Hoopoe

Wetlands play a critical role in sustaining our biodiversity. As we mark World Wetlands Day today, I want to share some of my images from wetlands of Gujarat. These have been central to my interest in appreciating and protecting our biodiversity.

I am a man of the forest
I always was, as were my ancestors
I was lost
And then I was found again
On the forest trails.

Leopards are hard to spot and photograph. They move about quickly and quietly in the thickets, preferring not to be seen. I was in the Terai forests, near the India-Nepal border, in peak winter. Morning drives in the forest very beautiful with thick fog and dreamy landscapes. But it is not possible to see any wildlife. On one afternoon I saw this leopard cross a trail for only a couple seconds.

Fire in the sky. Orion Nebula.

My third attempt at this deep sky object. I took over 150 images of 30 seconds each and stacked them together to get a final image. The light pollution is making it more and more difficult to do any night sky observing. The universe is up there to see only if we could be mindful about artificial lights.

This is the Triangulum Galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy 2.73 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye. However, it is impossible to see it in any city or small town. There needs to be almost zero light pollution to see it. Even with 150 images stacked together, my image (above) shows a faint galaxy. I hope to get a better picture when I gather patience for 3-4 hours of exposures.

This is Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Photographing this one was really hard for me. Many many hours to get this image.
Astronomy and astrophotography is a humbling experience. What we are seeing is 2.5 million light years away. And it is still the closest galaxy to ours. This image contains more than 1 trillion stars. I still have a long way to go to improve my astro work, but I'm proud of this one.

Our lives are illuminated; sparsely, dimly. Just like pin points of starlight in the maddening blackness of the universe. Sometimes on a winter's night, it can be achingly beautiful.

The Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades (M45), is an open star cluster in Taurus. Known as Parvin in Urdu and Krittika in Hindi, these are hot blue luminous stars embedded in a hazy reflection nebula. Mostly, 7 stars are visible to the naked eye. When Galileo saw it through a telescope, he found that there are many more stars in the cluster.

I have been wanting to combine my interests in astronomy and photography by exploring deep sky imaging. I have spent many hours getting this first image of Orion Nebula. This is a diffuse nebula in the Orion constellation. It is about 1500 light years away. About 700 new stars are being formed in the gases of this nebula. How incredible that I can see this nursery of stars from our planet. Photographed from highly light polluted city of Rajkot.

This was my first AP target.

With the incredibly light polluted city of Rajkot, I continue to fail at getting any sort of deep sky objects. More than 50% moon brightness added to my misery. Even with new moon, I barely manage to see anything below 35 degree altitude. Light pollution is the least talked about perhaps. The maddening LED hoardings blinding the eye at signals, uplighters on buildings, random spotlights during events, and much more.

Anyway, here's a half ridiculous image of Sirius, before I gave up for the night (after 2 hours of dawdling about).

The brightest star in our sky, Sirius is the first star I point to for alignment (after North Star, of course, for polar alignment). It is sad that Sirius, along with Capella and perhaps Mirfak, are themselves never observed or photographed. Just gently helping us find our way to other more "worthy" deep sky objects.

The alpha star of Canis Major, is a binary star about 25 times as bright as the sun. The rising of Sirius in the east at dawn marks the arrival of "dog days", the unbearable scorching summer.

On my recent birding trip in search of the winter migrants, I got this video of a large squadron of pelicans, drifting on the wetland lake. One can see the characteristic scooping action for feeding.

As winter arrives, we head out to our usual haunts in search of birds. And over the many seasons that I have been here, I have come to love the journey, the landscape, the heavy morning air, and the cold but burning sun.