Slashdot Mirror
The Night Sky In 800 Million Pixels
An anonymous reader recommends a project carried out recently by Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier. Brunier traveled to the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands and to the Chilean desert to capture 1,200 images — each one a 6-minute exposure — of the night sky. The photos were taken between August 2008 and February 2009 and required more than 30 full nights under the stars. Tapissier then processed the images together into a single zoomable, 800-megapixel, 360-degree image of the sky in which the Earth is embedded. "It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — it's constellations... whose names have nourished all childhoods, it's myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera." The image is the first of three portraits produced by the European Southern Observatory's GigaGalaxy Zoom project.
I can't believe it's already been Slashdotted! I was able to grab it on Coral, so now their servers have it, and should handle the load.
Here is that Coral link to this article:
http://www.sergebrunier.com.nyud.net/gallerie/pleinciel/index-eng.html
Willie...
A new record for slashdot destruction?
What is that super bright one below what I am guessing is the milkyway? If you zoom in on it, it still is large and dumping LOADS of light.
Does anyone know what kind of method they use to "stitch" together the images? What kind of projection they use, so the final imagen does indeed look like the milky way, and not stretched nor distorted?
800 megapixels would be a very large resolution for a normal image of a simple subject like, say, a person. But when you consider that this image is covering 360 degrees of night sky, which changes nightly (constellations and planets rise and set just like the sun), the resolution is not so great. An exposure time of 6 minutes (during which everything is moving) goes to show how "blurry" even an 800 megapixel image of the night sky (an enormous subject) must be. This doesn't take anything away by the beauty of this project, but I think it's important to put sensational measurements such as "800 megapixels" in context.
On a different note:
In 2009, you photograph sky. In 2010, sky photographs YOU!.
Yeah the main link is down, still down in fact as i write this... that was fast, any idea how many hits that took before it collapsed?
They go to all this effort to put massive, brilliant pictures online, but they forget to put it on a server remotely capable of handling it? Way to go.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?
That picture looked pretty impressive on display "in the Atrium of the Monte-Carlo Casino, Monaco." Unfortunately, it's no longer on display. It's an interesting story but I can't believe they paid someone to do this (if he did get paid which I assume he did).
idiot
This image was also he asronomy picture of the day for Sept 26th
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html
This was reported in Wired many days ago.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
why don't people mod these kinds of shitballs down?
It's full of stars.
I may be uneducated on it, but, I understand torrents with 15 seeders are slow and torrents with 15,000 Slashdotters would be fast.
Does anyone have a link to the full version somewhere?
I'll have to do some digging to see if I can find it . . .
Mihoshi would be proud.
He didn't even use de-speckle on it.
. .
They do even if it is a waste of perfectly good mod points.
Most people who live in cities never get to see even a fraction of the night sky. Even thougb I live in rural Colorado where we can see the Milky Way fairly regularly, I want to thank you so much for sharing with everyone what we are missing out on, night after night. This is way better than TV.
Cheers.
Now I think it's about time for Google to include that. I am expecting it gives me an direction from Earth to a random star on M12 , with several mode of transport (Walk, Spaceship, Wormhole)
Streetview would be bonus.
Folks, :)
Anyone want to comment on what appears like a picture of the Milky Way shot through a water spotted sheet of glass. (What an amazing picture!)
Does anyone want to comment on why the picture looks like the Milkyway photographed through a water spotted piece of glass. (I would have been bored after 3 days... :( )
I know I'm a couple hours late to the party, but this is just sad...
My RSS reader shows changes in feeds. The original RSS summary for this article had "its" without the apostrophe -- correctly, as anyone with half a brain knows. The latest RSS feed, and the actual story page, show "it's". Hint: if you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence, it's (yes, really) wrong.
Oh, yeah, and this is a really cool photo and etc.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
The logic behind this joke is as follows: The pornography industry plays a large role in determining which technologies evolve and end up as industry standard (mini dv, blu-ray, to name a few). As such, the joke above was playing upon this unfortunate determinant by poking fun at the fact that pornography can play a role in high technology even though in this case it obviously wouldn't (thus hyperbolic satire). I apologize if mod points were wasted rating this down, I'll try to avoid being so crass and childish in my future posts.
It's absolutely ridiculous to see this picture from septermber 26th http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html
Sites are claiming copyright as a concern, so you need to contact the artist to get the pic. I know downloading it is almost impossible due to the size, but really, pictures of the stars? Isn't this just tedious work that wouldn't be covered by copyright?
science space galaxy sky slashdotted
Which of these does not belong to the group?
My God, it's full of stars........
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
After reading your message and the one about the relative strengths of film and digital, it occurred to me to wonder what you could do with digital tracking. Basically stitching together a LOT of shorter exposure digital shots and correcting for the motion of the earth algorithmically to synthesize a long exposure image. It seems like an obvious hack for someone with a digital back and a fixed scope.
"The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera."
Umm, yea. I'll let you think about that sentence for a while. I'm waiting for a 200MP optical upgrade ala Geordi LaForge with that kind of statement.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.
No it was made with a regular digital camera, because nobody gave you access to a telescope. :P
But at least you found a beautiful excuse. So still kudos for the hard work.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There is one star that stands out amongst all the others to the left of and below the cloud, when you zoom in on it it looks like a drawing of the sun.
Is this a star that's gone super-nova?
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
That is really amazing. It's one of the best images of the sky I've ever seen that wasn't taken by the Hubble. The only thing that would make it better is if they made it interactive and labelled the stars and constellations. Very cool.