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...
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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!.
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).
This image was also he asronomy picture of the day for Sept 26th
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html
It's full of stars.
if that's full size i got one that's bigger.
Does anyone have a link to the full version somewhere?
I'll have to do some digging to see if I can find it . . .
He didn't even use de-speckle on it.
. .
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.
Because only criminals use torrents.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
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!
It's absolutely ridiculous to see this picture from septermber 26th http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090926.html
No, there's no full-res version. You have to email the artist for it.
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.
Oh, I dunno; I'm not too impressed by the way that the stars near galactic north and south are spread out into lines. This image doesn't use the best sort of sphere-to-plane projection. I wonder if we can get it in a better projection? I'm not sure I even want to see what looks like if I try to zoom in on the polar regions.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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?
If it's equirectangular (as I think it is) then it should come out nicely in ptviewer.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
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.