Midnight at Pangong. When the cold doesn't stop you.

Pangong Tso, Ladakh May 2026. 5 min read There are nights that remind you exactly why you carry a camera everywhere. This was one of them, and it came at -4°C, somewhere on the edge of the world. I had been wanting to visit Pangong Tso for years. The kind of place you see in photographs and quietly tell yourself: someday. Well, someday finally arrived, and no photograph quite prepares you for the real thing.

The lake sits at over 4,350 metres above sea level, straddling the border between India and China. The air is thin, the silence is almost physical, and the light has this quality I can only describe as cinematic. But I was not there for the day. I was there for the night. Stepping out at midnight Our camp had settled into that deep, still quiet that only remote places get after dark. The temperature had dropped to -4°C, genuinely biting cold, the kind that makes your fingers clumsy and your breath hang in the air in little puffs. Every sensible part of my brain said: stay in the sleeping bag.

I did not listen to that part of my brain.

I grabbed my phone, layered up as best I could, and stepped outside. What I saw when I looked up stopped me completely. I have seen clear skies before. I spend a lot of my time chasing them. But Pangong at midnight was something else entirely. The Milky Way was not a faint smudge. It was a whole structure, arching overhead with texture and depth, the galactic core sitting right above the lake like it had been put there for a painting. The stars were so dense it almost looked like noise.

Setup shot at Pangong Tso · Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra · Expert RAW · Midnight, approx -4°C

Shooting the deep sky on a phone I shoot with a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, and for astrophotography I rely on Expert RAW. It is Samsung's pro camera app that gives you full control over exposure, ISO, and shutter speed, and has a dedicated Astrophoto mode that stacks multiple long exposures to pull out detail and reduce noise.

Set up: Tripod + Samsung S26 Ultra (Expert Raw)

That night, the conditions were borderline perfect: no moon, no light pollution for hundreds of kilometres, and that bone-dry Ladakhi air which cuts atmospheric haze down to almost nothing. I set the phone on a small tripod, pointed it toward the core, and let Expert RAW do its thing.

What came back genuinely surprised me. Nebulae I would normally only see in images from dedicated astro cameras were visible in the frame, subtle but there. The galactic dust lanes had real texture. And the lake below reflected just enough starlight to give the whole scene a mirror-like quality I was not expecting at all. Why I keep doing this People sometimes ask me why I bother. Why not just look up and enjoy it rather than fussing with settings in the freezing cold? Honestly, because a camera sees things your eye does not. The long exposure pulls light out of the dark. Nebulae that are invisible to the naked eye start to show their colour and shape in a photograph. Deep sky objects that exist as pinpricks suddenly have context and form.

For me, astrophotography is not really about the gear or the technical side, though I love all of that too. It is about having a reason to actually stop, look up, and spend an hour under a sky that most people never get to see. The cold keeps you honest. The image keeps the memory.

Pangong gave me both. Standing there at midnight, fingers going numb, watching the phone work through its exposure stacks while the lake shimmered below, that is the kind of thing that makes you feel very small and very lucky at the same time. "The best camera is the one that gets you outside at midnight in -4°C without a second thought."