Posted on 03/19/2021 7:59:58 AM PDT by Red Badger
Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I sure wish I could feel extremely small and awed right now"? Do we ever have the solution for you!
After over a decade of painstaking work, Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released an absolutely jaw-dropping 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic started in 2009, with photographing various nebulae around the Milky Way as independent compositions.
The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is around 1,250 hours. (To load the full image in its 11.5 MB glory, click here.)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TqRxEAjrDYI/YFCLF-H8K3I/AAAAAAAAS-E/rj_avOwDgw0TP66RQURSDcDIOPPxJIscgCLcBGAsYHQ/s7023/000-GrandeMosaic120DegreesLONG.jpg
"It took almost twelve years to finalize this mosaic image," Metsavainio wrote on his blog, Astro Anarchy.
"The reason for a long time period is naturally the size of the mosaic and the fact that the image is very deep. Another reason is that I have shot most of the mosaic frames as individual compositions and publish them as independent artworks.
"That leads to a kind of complex image set which is partly overlapping with a lot of unimaged areas between and around frames. I have shot the missing data now and then during the years and last year I was able to publish many sub mosaic images as I got them ready first."
Stitching the images together was a matter of matching stars and overlaying them in Photoshop, with minor tweaking between the frames to match color balance and light curves, he explained.
The resulting image is around 100,000 pixels across, made up of 234 individual mosaic panels, covering an area of sky 125 by 22 degrees.
That's a significant swathe of the galactic plane, including about 20 million stars, and the full-size color image measuring 7,000 by 1,300 pixels is truly jaw-dropping. The colors you see represent the emission from ionized elements; hydrogen is shown in green, sulfur in red, and oxygen in blue.
"I think this is the first image ever showing the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels," Metsavainio told photography website PetaPixel.
mosaic nebula (© J-P Metsavainio)
It makes for a magnificently dazzling view of our home galaxy, and one that we can't help but get lost in. If you are not sure where to start, or would like to know more about what you're looking at, Metsavainio has helpfully posted a series of frames from the mosaic on his blog, showcasing individual nebulae.
We can also most heartily recommend visiting his portfolio to take an awe-inspiring stroll through his body of work. His 3D animations of nebulae in particular will absolutely fill you with fernweh for interstellar space travel.
You must have a big monitor......................
Where da Walmart at?
Once again, I appreciate Free Republic, not just for the amazing articles people post, but the great conservative commentary. Few other places will you find people connecting awesome photography with the Almighty that created the scene.
You thought your vote didn’t matter much.
Oh God, your sea is so great and my boat is so small. -—Fisherman’s Prayer.
Sort of scary when you grasp the distances involved, our nearest neighboring star is only 4.5 light years away if we could triple our current fastest speed, around 40,000 mph it would only take around 55,000 years to get there...
Would love to have seen that...got a little taste in Northern Saskatchewan once
I have experienced the same thing, but at sea level during offshore sailboat adventure. It’s best when the moon is about half in the middle of the day, so it is completely absent at night.
It feels like you can reach out and almost touch the stars.
“Many variables involved: Type of film, speed of film, if”
Google “pictures of andromeda galaxy”. You’ll see it rendered in various color schemes.
With tears in my eyes, I feel like I am looking inside God’’s brain...............
Imagine how much better it would have been if he went 13 years jnstead? The slacker! J/k very cool project
Wow.
It makes my heart swell...
Creation is an act of Love.
will absolutely fill you with fernweh
I knew it had to be something...
Yet, the Milky Way is a very tiny part of what we know as the universe.
—
It is indeed as the Milky Way is only the stars within our own galaxy and there are currently estimated to be some 2 trillion galaxies in the Universe. That number is even bigger than the last Porkulus bill.
Stunning. I can’t imagine the feeling. I can see how that would be life altering. We could all use a serious reality check from time to time, especially when we are mad at some waitress who may be new or may have a dozen serious problems she is juggling at home. When you have these silly first world problems, it would be nice to be able to look up into such a sky and regain a perspective on what is really important and what is really not that important. The waitress is a little slow. So what.
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