Photopic Sky Survey produces 360-degree photographic panorama of the Milky Way
The billions and billions of stars that illuminate the sky in the night are members of the Milky Way galaxy. It would take approximately 100,000 years for a ray of light originating from one end of the galaxy to reach another end of the stellar disk. Hence, it is quite natural that the picture of the entire night could not be captured with conventional imaging techniques.
Composing a panorama of the Milky Way is a challenging task, which only a handful of enthusiastic people with a deep knowledge of photography could fulfill. For Nick Risinger, a 28-year old Seattle-based amateur astronomer and photographer, capturing the night sky meant quitting his job as a marketing director to travel 60,000 miles in the northern and southern hemisphere to shoot the Milky Way with six cameras.
Before moving ahead with the Photopic Sky Survey, Risinger segregated the sky into over 600 equal sections. Around the new moon nights, when the nights were dark and long, Risinger snapped pictures of the night sky from different locations in Western US and South Africa. The six high-end monochrome astrophotography imagers, positioned on hilly locales, were programmed to detect changes in the night sky. Thousands of images of the sky were snapped simultaneously as the heavenly bodies moved across the sky.
Finally, the astro-photographer created a stunning 360-degree photographic panorama of the Milky Way galaxy by stitching together 37,440 exposures. The 5-megapixel resolution photo of the sky survey, which could be viewed on Risinger’s website, skysruvey.org, presents the pictures of planets and stars as they appear in the night sky in their true colors. To get a more detailed and clearer view of certain portions of the galaxy, you can zoom in on relevant regions. To give an idea of the temperature of the stars, Risinger shot the pictures in red and blue. To create a sense of depth and richness, he also used green in the photo shoots.
Although the scientific community might benefit from the sky survey, the image is created primarily for educational purpose.
Via: DailyMail
