According to a report by Space.com, the image below shows a new, complete night sky panorama stitched together from 3,000 individual photographs, with the most captivating feature being our own Milky Way galaxy. It is reported that the night sky panorama was completed by Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University over a period of 22 months. During this time, he traveled over 26,000 miles (approximately 42,000 kilometers) across South Africa, Texas, and Michigan to capture digital photographs of the night sky.
Image Description: High-resolution night sky panorama, click to enlarge. From home.arcor.de, you can also visit here for more details.
Mellinger stated: “This panorama shows stars that are a thousand times fainter than what the human eye can see. In addition, we can see hundreds of galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae in the image.” To combine the captured photos, simple cutting and pasting was clearly far from sufficient. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere and contains distortions, much like the distortions found in photographs of the Earth. These distortions must be taken into account during the seamless stitching process. To achieve this, Mellinger utilized a mathematical model and spent hundreds of hours in front of a computer.
Another problem encountered during the stitching process was how to handle the different background lights in the photographs. Mellinger said: “Due to artificial light pollution, natural airglow, and the scattering of sunlight by dust within the solar system, it is clearly impossible to take wide-field astronomical photographs with a perfectly uniform background.”
To solve this problem, Mellinger utilized data obtained from the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes. These data allowed him to distinguish which parts were unwanted background light and which were light emitted by stars, subsequently removing the unwanted background light from each photograph before stitching them together. The final panorama shows no visible traces of stitching.
Mellinger will describe the production process of the panorama in the November issue of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The panorama presents a view of the Milky Way that no stargazer could see from a single observation point on Earth. It is reported that Mellinger plans to make this 648-megapixel complete night sky panorama available to planetariums worldwide.
Text from “Sina”: http://tech.sina.com.cn/d/2009-11-03/07263558698.shtml
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