REVscene Automotive Forum - Extreme pano of the sky

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Quote:

http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/

Physicist Makes New High-Res Panorama of Milky Way
Cobbling 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: http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.

“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.