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.

Comments

Already slashdotted! Here's a Coral link

[Announcer]

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

Re:Already slashdotted! Here's a Coral link

[palegray.net]

The Coral link isn't loading for me, either... I found a scaled down version that gives readers a decent idea of what it looks like, though.

Re:Already slashdotted! Here's a Coral link

[Announcer]

It would appear that the Coral servers are acquiring bits and pieces as they are able. When I reloaded the link, I was able to see much more of the site than at first. Be patient... and try reloading in a few minutes.

It should be standard procedure when posting any article to Slashdot, to run it though Coral *FIRST*, so their servers can load and mirror everything. Then post the Coral link.

But that would be too easy.

Re:Slashdotted before the first comment?

[palegray.net]

Here's a direct link to the full-size version of the image contained in my earlier comment: panoramic night sky view. It is indeed absolutely gorgeous.

Awesome project, deceiving "resolution"

[edwebdev]

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!.

Re:Awesome project, deceiving "resolution"

[langelgjm]

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.

He used a moving equatorial mount to correct for the earth's motion.

Re:Awesome project, deceiving "resolution"

[Anonymous Coward]

.. a staggering 26000x26000! I can't find an image viewer that displays them properly without crashing X.. even feh won't take it

Try GQView - handles 21,000x21,000px tiff images fairly well. Takes a while to crunch it all but stays fairly responsive once the image is loaded.

Alternative Link [Astronomy picture of the Day]

[Anonymous Coward]

This image was also he asronomy picture of the day for Sept 26th

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html

Re:Projection

[ceoyoyo]

Go wide. And you'll have to go much faster than you think. Play around, but IIRC with no tracking you can only reasonably get about 20 seconds out of a 50 mm (35 mm camera) lens. Faster film gets you a deeper image but more grain of course. Most constellations fit nicely in the frame from a 50 mm lens.

Unfortunately, you won't get anything like this with film, at least not without an incredible amount of work and some really excellent tracking. Film rules for long exposures but digital is unbeatable for deep work because you can stack shorter exposures.

Since you're using film, consider exploiting it's strengths and get some star trail shots.