It all started with two PVC pipes for Sarath Prabhav.
While in Class 12, he fashioned the pipes into a homemade telescope using lenses purchased from the market. It was a longtime dream — to see the moon in all its glory. A camera was a luxury for a schoolboy, and mobile phone cameras were still in their infancy. So he would borrow his friends’ phones and photograph the moon through the telescope. “Grainy snaps,” he laughs.
Yet, the moon kept calling him. “I experienced a high as I slowly began discovering the details — the craters, the hills, and so on,” he says.
Sarath’s fascination deepened at the Thiruvananthapuram Planetarium, where he became a regular at its evening stargazing sessions. “There, the telescope opened up a whole new world. I started staying back late just to get a better look at the moon and the stars,” he says.
The boy with the homemade telescope would eventually become a trainer in astro-tourism and astrophotography.
Similarly, Rohith KA, a software engineer, also began chasing the moon at a young age. “It is the most accessible celestial body,” he says. “You can see it with the naked eye and capture it even with a smartphone.”
As a child, he had heard stories about the rabbit on the moon. “But when I first looked through a telescope, I saw the craters and the shadows. Quite dreamy...way more fascinating than the rabbit,” he laughs.
For Rohith, the moon was only the beginning. “For most astrophotographers, the moon is the starting point of discovering the enigmatic mysteries of the deep sky,” he says. Today, he zooms in on comets, nebulae, and the Milky Way. “There’s so much to discover in the night sky,” he gushes with childlike excitement.
A Milky Way picture posted by a friend in 2019 was what drew L Sai Srinivas to look up at the sky. “That was roughly the time I got my hands on a DSLR (camera). I shot my first proper Milky Way shot from my terrace in May 2020. I was hooked,” he recalls.
Dheeraj Khandelwal, meanwhile, believes astrophotography gives you the perspective of how big the universe is. “Just looking at the stars...one spark or one twinkle of light that we see in the night sky might be another galaxy that might be bigger than us, and we don’t know about it. Those things really fascinate me,” he shares, adding that observing the sky from a dark space with the endless universe around you is inexplicable.
Astrophotography is more than capturing the stars. It’s never about the final image. It’s about the beautiful process of being out there under the heavens, believes Sai. “I can bet there is nothing better in the world than seeing the Milky Way with your own eyes,” he says. Dheeraj concurs, sharing his own experience of watching “one of the clearest Milky Ways” at Langza, Spiti.
To begin astrophotography, one needs to learn the night sky, then finding and shooting objects becomes much easier, says Sai. “Since Chennai is very light-polluted, you can begin with your smartphone itself. All you need is a tripod and a Bluetooth shutter. Experiment with the settings in Pro/Expert mode. The next progression is getting a DSLR camera on a tripod with a prime lens, like a 50mm f/1.8 or 135mm f/2. With this, you can shoot deep-sky objects,” he offers, quashing common misconception that one needs expensive gears to get into this hobby. “Current technology proves that wrong. You can start with whatever you have and upgrade later accordingly,” he adds.
Dheeraj likens this passion to knowing a person from afar. “When you come close and talk to them, you start to notice all the small details, and sometimes those details are what you start liking. The same thing happens with the moon. When you’re shooting at a very high focal length, you get to see the craters and the textures that were not visible before. Then you suddenly realise there are so many details in it, and you understand that the moon is not white. There are a lot of colours inside it,” he explains.
Beauty beyond what the naked eye can appreciate. This is what hooked astro-landscape photographer Navaneeth Unnikrishnan as well. “The moon can be photographed from almost anywhere, but its character changes dramatically beneath darker, less polluted skies,” he says.
Getting the perfect shot, however, is anything but easy. “The moon is intensely bright against a dark sky, creating a dynamic range that’s difficult to capture in a single frame,” Navneeth explains. “Atmospheric turbulence softens fine details. The Earth’s rotation demands precise shutter speeds or tracking mounts, especially with long focal-length telescopes. And achieving perfect focus at such magnifications is incredibly challenging. Even tiny vibrations or optical imperfections can blur the crater textures.”
Sai further breaks down the science and explains, “Since the earth is rotating, you cannot shoot long exposures on just a tripod, so you shoot thousands of short exposure frames according to the 300 Rule (300 ÷ focal length = shutter speed). Later, you can stack these exposures and process them. To further improve the images, you can add a star tracker, which fixes the problem of earth’s rotation.”
Every time they have pointed the lens towards the moon, the photographers have had fulfilling experiences. Yet, each of them have a favourite click. For Sai, it was the Stable Auroral Arc from Tso Moriri, Ladakh. “It happened on May 10-11, 2024. I was one of the very few who got to see this rare phenomenon from such a low latitude. “That night will stay with me for my lifetime,” he recalls. For Dheeraj, it was in Phugtal Monastery in Zanskar, one of the most isolated monasteries in India. “I stayed there for around one week with the monks. During one of those days, just before moonrise, the entire galaxy was visible above the monastery. That was one of the most amazing things that I had seen,” he says.
The moon remains irresistible. A thing of beauty, after all, is a joy forever. “The waning phases, eclipses, the supermoon... though familiar, it reveals something new with every click. One can’t just get enough of it,” smiles Rohith. During a lunar eclipse, he gushes, it turns a “mesmerising shade of red”. “And during a solar eclipse, watching the ring of fire form is just amazing. I was in the Andaman Islands during the last solar eclipse. I will never forget that moment.” For Sarath, moon photography eventually became a gateway to something much larger. “Initially, my interest was rooted in the cultural aspects,” he says. “Finding our birth stars in the sky fascinated me. Science reveals endless cosmic beauty, mysteries, and puzzles.”
Navaneeth’s passion has taken him across the world. He has photographed the moon above snow-covered mountains in New Zealand and beneath the pink-and-green glow of the aurora borealis in Sweden.
Yet his favourite memory is of a moon he never photographed. A crescent moon rising over a placid lake in New Zealand. “An orange moon on the horizon in the wee hours. Its glow shimmering on the water. It felt like a poem coming alive — or a fantasy beyond my imagination,” he smiles.
He did not raise his camera. “I didn’t have the right equipment,” he says. “And honestly, I didn’t feel like trying. Some moments are meant only for your own eyes.” Perhaps that’s what it really means to be moonstruck.