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: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.

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

ThankYouThankYouThankYou

[T1girl]

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.