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

Re:ThankYouThankYouThankYou

[TheoMurpse]

I was recently at Yosemite during the Perseid meteor shower, and I got to really look at the Milky Way "scar" for the first time with my own eyes. My parents have a house in rural Texas, but the visibility was nowhere near what it was smack dab in the middle of a wide open Yosemite field at midnight.

Re:ThankYouThankYouThankYou

[dargaud]

I spent a couple years in Antarctica: clearest sky in the world by very far (see recent /. article about ridge A). When I was at Dome C, we would go lay down in the snow and watch the stars, never mind the sub -70C temperatures. The stars didn't twinkle at all (no turbulence) and appeared painted on a black ceiling. The main problem was getting back inside before you were frozen solid to the ground.

I had my own telescope, but my pitiful attempts at seeing anything were thwarted by the vexatious cold and my own incompetence at astronomy.