Hacker News Reader

Comment by dding | Hacker News Reader

Wow amazing work! The scale of this project reminds me of another photographer's five year project of creating a 2.5 gigapixel photo of Orion: https://orion2020v5b.spaceforeverybody.com/

View on HN

This is fantastic.

I immediately wondered how he managed to seamlessly mosaic together what is surely hundreds of images and thousands of subs. Here are the details: https://space4everybody.com/processing-details/

And equipment: https://space4everybody.com/technical-details-equipment/

Nothing too fancy (in astrophotography relative terms). A decent refractor and mono camera (such parameters have come down in price by 2-3 times, ASI2600MM is comparable) and most importantly, a solid pier/mount.

  267 Individual panels (including reshoots)
  12,816 Individual light frames
  65,000 x 35,000 in it’s entirety
  5 States traversed to image
  640.8 Imaging hours
  500+ Editing hours
  2.5 Gigapixel Image
  1.6 Pixel scale
  5 Years
  1 Mosaic

Just WOW

Unfortunately they don't seem to have a link to the final "full-res" image. I'd love to put that with my collection of other massive-res images. My screensaver pans between random spots on massive images in a folder.

They sell their photography. I'm sure you can reach out for a price quote.

Hey, would you share your library publicly or privately? I've been looking for something like this :)

Also, check out dezoomify[0]

[0] https://ophir.alwaysdata.net/dezoomify/dezoomify.html

Here's a link: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ag4tKq5B7NFurglGuNpfDUKeHA7p?e=k9aejz

My libraries are always made of images I've found online. I've lost two libraries over time so I'm on my third one now.

I haven't added to my library in a while, but I might spend a few hours looking for some more images this weekend.

The current stats for my library:

At the moment it's 1.47gb for 75 images. I'm not sure where I have copied each image from, but I know some are either from ESO or NASA's image of the day, except that I find the original non-browser friendly images and download those. If I can get an image I like larger than my 5k screen, I'll add it to my library.

My average image size is 7156x5412.

My largest image is 324,000,000 pixels (18,000x18,000), pretty sure it's the Orion Nebula.

My smallest image is 2,958,400 pixels (so only 1720x1720), however any image that is surrounded by black (like a planet with no stars around may be cropped from time to time). Since my screensaver puts black around any images smaller than my 5k screen, it still works out. I'm pretty sure the smallest image is an image of Uranus from the Voyager that flew past it and I wanted to make sure I had an image of at least every planet in the Solar system and that was the best image of it I could find.

Something about that Orion photo in particular makes it seem beyond belief that there is not other life around other stars in the galaxy.

For me, it was this image and story that removed any shred of doubt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

The tiny speck of dust that is our whole world is less than a grain of sand on the beaches of the universe.

We are not alone.

Which doesn't mean that we would want to meet any of our neighbors!

Frankly, since we only have ourselves to sample, we have no idea how large the survivorship bias is. It doesn't matter if there's googol of galaxies or just one galaxy, we have zero direct information on how easily life arises. Putting it another way, observing a googol of galaxies ought to pretty much not at all increase our confidence that other life exists, like how observing a 200% increase in a speed doesn't tell you anything when you don't know what the absolute speed was to start with.

You're right in regards to sample size.

However, one thing this argument often ignores is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life is 3.5 billion years old. The Earth was hot molten rock up until about 20 million years before life began.

So we went from Zero to Life in 20 million.

Once created it was so successful that it took over nearly every part of the Earth in a multitude of evolving forms.

It seems improbable life makes it's appearance so improbably early on Earth that perhaps the only explanation is that life isn't so improbable after all. Perhaps it's even highly likely give the physics of the universe.

This is true, but I don't find it persuasive.

We know that simple chemistry plus lots of energy can create more complicated chemistry. We have evidence that some protein molecules can be self-replicating under the right conditions.

Given billions of parallel experiments over billions of years, I think it is vanishingly unlikely that exactly one has progressed to the point we would recognize as self-organizing.

But that's faith, not proof. I'll defend it as the most reasonable and non-exceptional version of the story, but I won't claim it as absolute truth.

Looking at these pictures, I've began to ponder how much of an influence the night sky has been in religion and mythology throughout the millennia.

And in the modern world, we are blind to it because of light pollution. It's sad. One of the most amazing experiences ever, a truly dark, clear sky at night, is only accessible if you travel off-continent.

You better believe it.

I couldn't believe what the sky looked like at night when I moved to Australia from the UK. And I was in a relatively suburban setting then. I regularly go camping now maybe every 1-2 months out into the outback. And the night sky, without exaggeration and using the words here sensibly, literally, never, gets old. In my 19 years in the UK I never saw anything like it.

Edit: Admittedly I think the constant cloud coverage in the UK was more of a hindrance than the light pollution here I lived. Or at least it was so fucking cloudy so fucking often, I had no idea how bad the light pollution was.

I remember when I first moved here and looked up to the sky from my back yard and I could see Orions Belt. Now I'm less than a novice, I only recognised it from Men in Black (don't judge me). But that feeling I had in that moment stuck with me.

And I get such a ridiculous glee when I can drive 1-2 hours from Brisbane city and see the most ridiculous night skys I've ever seen. Keep travelling west and it just gets better and better. I can't wait to visit on of the Dark Night Sky locations.

NSW, Australia: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/conservation-and-herita...

Ah man, damn it! I spent 10 months in Australia, but most of it was during lockdown, and I didn't have a car. I only got 1 week of travel and didn't see much of the stars.

My best experience was in Fiji and New Zealand, but I imagine that the outback could be even better.

I've gone out to Mojave on super clear nights. Vegas is easily visible, almost like a sunrise. The Great Smoky Mountains look good on paper (light pollution map), but in practice they are quite clowdy / hazy, so viewing isn't good. I imagine northern Canada could also be quite good.

Man that sucks! Were you mostly in Melbourne during this time? They were in lock down for a long time but most of the rest of the country was only 1-2 months of severe lock down (hard limits on leaving the suburb and then later, a hard 50KM limit from your place of residence).

I was in Canberra, which wasn't technically locked down for all that long, so I could probably have gone out more. It was generally very demotivating being there during the pandemic, so I mostly just farted around the lake on my bike. It's a big lake, though!

Cheers and happy trails. I'll return to Aus sometime!

For me the real shock was Lord Howe Island, which is 600km from the mainland and surrounded by nothing but open ocean. At night, the entire island has only a few dozens lights on for marine safety, powered by a diesel generator.

On a clear, moonless night the sky is just unbelievable. You can see several galaxies with the naked eye, which is not something I had experienced before!

Thanks for this! I will absolutely need to visit!

The path to modern astronomy went like this: cultures that lasted a long time (Multiple hundreds of years) typically developed observatories that defined the yearly calendar as well as dates of religious observances. Many times, their observations got very accurate and they could predict various things, although surprising stuff still happened. Eventually, civilizations lasted through multiple solar eclipse cycles and noticed they were periodic (keeping great records for hundreds of years and maintaing a class of people who can work with them is nontrivial). This eventually led to people being able to predict nearly all planet's motions with surprising accuracy (see the antikythera mechanism).

So I think it's had a huge influence ,and one that ultimately led to a scientific understanding of the cosmos. At this point, JPL can predict the location of nearly every major solar object for decades into the future and the main challenege is determining whether object movement is truly chaotic.

Agreed. I very recently was thinking about how humans up to a few hundred years ago must have seen the most breath taking night skies. Imagine a native American standing in a clearing at night 2000 years ago, with zero light pollution, looking at the night sky and just wondering what it is all about.

Even w/ a clear desert sky hundreds of miles from the nearest city (e.g. middle of Nevada), the sky looks nothing like these pictures. Astrophotography uses exposure times many multiples--and usually several orders of magnitude--longer than the human eye.

Can you see the Milkyway? No, not really; not without prompting. If you have no idea what to look for, the disc is just a barely imperceptible, slight increase in otherwise meager (relative to astrophotographs) star density. I've never seen it, nor other constellations, because I don't really know what to look for, though I've spent many hours staring up at the sky from various places, including extremely remote desert and mountain locales--Western U.S., Northern Mexico, Mongolia, Ecuador, Chile, etc.

Of course, there's no way to understand the awe and wonderment somebody lacking our knowledge, experience, and expectations may have experienced. Especially if they had never seen an astrophotograph.

EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if astrology, navigation, and astronomy might have developed more slowly if the human eye had greater fidelity. With only several thousand stars visible (much fewer readily discernible, especially if you're not an adolescent w/ fresh corneas), the motion of stars probably stands out more. Imagine trying to recognize and track the planets on a background as dense as an astrophotograph. Where to start? Would you even recognize the relative motion? People had much fewer distractions during nighttime back then, but it still seems substantially more daunting.

I agree with your larger premise, but:

> Can you see the Milkyway? No, not really

This is not my experience. I have seen the Milky Way very clearly from a few locations in the US. None are particularly remote -- all are just a few hours drive from the large cities I've lived in. Winter months are clearer than summer.

Yeah I agree. Not only have I seen the milky way, but I've seen andromeda with my naked eye from the right place on the right night, within a day's drive from very populated cities.

+1. I’ve not seen it for 10 years (since I’ve lived in the United States) but growing up in New Zealand, looking up at the Milky Way with your naked eye, it’s definitely clear the increased density of stars. Doesn’t look anything like photos, but very beautiful.

Where I grew up in rural Wisconsin I could see it at night laying out on our front lawn. Not super bright, but you could definitely tell it was there.

> I have seen the Milky Way very clearly from a few locations in the US.

I agree. heck, I remember stargazing in rural New Mexico in the 70's, the moonless night sky was luminous to the dark-adapted eye. The Milky Way was a river of stars, bright enough to read by (well, distinguish the words on the page, I don't remember spending much time reading...)

Completely agree, I've seen the Milky Way just by traveling to a city called Eskilstuna, some 200km away from Stockholm, in the middle of the forest and away from settlements you could see the Milky Way much brighter than just a faint streak of light.

Maybe its clouds, or air quality, or general deteriorating climate, about 30 years ago, my village in plains of Punjab, we used to see lots of stars, constellations, & planets along with satellites at night time. Maybe absence of tv, mobile, culture of sleeping on roof in summers, made us more aware of stars. Full moon nights were like brightly lit. No moon nights were amazingly dark. We could see shadows in moon light. Things were just like day, but in dark blue grey color. We always saw the north pole star, few other groups, & watched milky way moving from side to side in night. Did not know its name, we call it SkyRiver in our language (Galaxy). For reference, now I am in northern california small town.

That is exactly the feeling I get the couple of times when I am out hiking hiking and see the most spectacular winter night sky. The feeling of being in the middle of nowhere and seeing the dark sky with an uncountable number of stars is indescribable. I believe it is a great loss of modern society and I really hope we are able to do something about it, we could do just fine without most of the street lighting we have today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com