Source: Gizmodo Physicist Axel Mellinger travelled 26,000 miles and pieced together over 3,000 individual images to create this, one of the most stunning panoramas of our galaxy every assembled. Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website. "This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says. Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, "the real work started," Mellinger said. Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model-and hundreds of hours in front of a computer. Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph. "Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background," Mellinger said. To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy. The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.
Some impressive work there. The results look great too (well, from what I can see of a much smaller image anyway!).
thats awesome... i tried to find at least a larger scale image (obviously not the actual 648 megapixel since that would be too large for DL) but couldn't. did find this: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1576 its a garden grown to scale with the galaxy at a scale of 83 light years per inch
On a similar note, life size blue whale: http://www.wdcs.co.uk/media/flash/whalebanner/content_pub_en.html
The new Milky Way panorama in Hammer-Aitoff projection. Click on the link to see a zoomable Mercator projection. now that I am humbled and feel so tiny and insignificant....need to kick some PC games to get my epeen back. Interested in the image? * Science users: here is a medium-resolution (3600×1800) FITS cube with WCS header. For higher resolution, please email me, stating the intended use of the image. Please allow a few days for my reply. If you use my image in a publication, please acknowledge the source as follows: Axel Mellinger, A Color All-Sky Panorama Image of the Milky Way, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific 121, 1180-1187 (2009). * Personal use: Follow the download links for Mercator and Hammer-Aitoff projections (each 2000 pixels wide). * Higher resolutions, commercial & educational use: In most cases, this will require payment of a license fee (unfortunately, camera equipment and intercontinental travel do not come for free…). Please contact my business partner for license information and pricing (provide as much information as possible on the intended use, as well as your preferred projection and resolution): EKTECH Köhler GmbH Werrastr. 1a 12059 Berlin Germany Email: HRB 31686, AG Berlin-Charlottenburg Geschäftsführer: Dipl.-Phys. Eberhard Köhler Umsatzsteuer-ID-Nr. (VAT-ID-No.): DE 136 778 723 … and here is the link to film-based panorama image, created in 1997-2000 Virtual Reality Milky Way Panorama Acknowledgments This page would not exist without the free panorama tools created by Helmut Dersch. Some hotspots point to images taken by Matt BenDaniel.