An Indian astronomer named Dorje Angchuk has recently released an absolutely breathtaking time-lapse video capturing the rotation of the Earth against the beautiful Ladakhlandscape. The clip was taken at the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, where the Milky Way stands still and the planet moves beneath it, showing a rare sight of cosmic movement.

As the engineer-in-charge at the observatory, Mr. Angchuk wanted to make a seamless 24-hour time-lapse capturing this change from day to night. His video is titled A Day in Motion – Capturing Earth's Rotation, in which he gives a critical message: “The stars remain still, but Earth never stops spinning.”

He wanted to create a time-lapse in which viewers can go through these planetary movements in a continuous loop.

It was not easy to implement such an ambitious project to capture extreme challenges in the extreme conditions of Ladakh. Mr. Angchuk had first focused on the Orion constellation, which he could hardly shoot due to its positioning at his latitude. Furthermore, Ladakh's harsh cold would quickly drain out the batteries from his camera and stress out the equipment to its limits.

He spent more than four nights, with a series of failures like battery failure, storage constraints, and timer malfunctions. Yet, these didn't make him weaker; rather, he mastered his techniques with the addition of a motion tracker and mobile-controlled exposure adjustments.

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Even after having recorded the footage, there was another post-processing challenge he had to undergo. He needed to crop all the inconsistencies in framing to finally produce a video that was very polished and smooth.

The idea for this project actually came from a request to create a time-lapse that could help students understand the Earth's rotation through visual storytelling. Mr. Angchuk observed: 

“This idea cropped up when I was asked in case a time-lapse can be done so that students can understand the Earth's rotation through a video. It would have been a more interesting frame with a wide-angle lens.”

To fully appreciate the video's breathtaking details, Mr. Angchuk recommends watching it in loop mode and full-screen, so that the viewers can be fully immersed in the celestial phenomenon of the Earth beneath an unchanging sky.

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