Amateur Photographer Shoots 37,000 Photo Panorama of the Night Sky

wired.com

38 points·timerickson··9 comments

A magnificent starscape from the point of view of our pale blue dot.

Ironically you may be inclined to look at the brightest, colorful part of the galaxy but be sure to take a look at the overwhelming number of stars that pop up by zooming in the darkest areas by a few notches. Breathtaking.

Best experienced fullscreen.

Openzoom version works better for me: http://media.skysurvey.org/openzoom.html

i just love the fact that with all the really expensive (so i believe) hardware and software he used, this really stood out to me:

"GIMP: final assembly, curve & saturation tweaks" (from his website skysurvey.org)

I was curious what software would be powerful and flexible enough to stitch together 37,000 photos. Clearly GIMP is the choice for that job.

Mosaics that include far more photos are made all the time using spacecraft data. One of the software packages of choice is ISIS: http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/

That's amazing. I would love to know what is in the center of is in the center of our galaxy?!

Current theories hold that there's a supermassive black hole at the center, surrounded by a very high density of massive, old stars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center

Maybe the other end of our galaxy ;)

I wonder how long the hardware took to render/stich it all together? Amazing shot

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