Ever think to yourself, “Gosh, I definitely wish I was feeling really small and awful right now”? Do we ever have the solution for you!
After more than a decade of meticulous work, Finnish astronaut JP Metsavainio has released a 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the Milky Way galaxy plane.
Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic began in 2009, with photographs of various nebulae around the Milky Way as writings. independent.
The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is approximately 1,250 hours. (To the full image in glory 11.5 MB, click here.)
(© JP Metsavainio)
“It took nearly a dozen years to complete this mosaic image,” Metsavainio wrote on his blog, Astro Anarchy.
“The reason for a long time naturally is the size of the mosaic and the fact that the image is very deep. Another reason is that I have burned most of the mosaic frames as fa writing. half and publish them as independent works of art.
“That leads to a kind of complex image set that partially engages with a lot of unchanged fields between and around frames. I’ve now burned the required data and then over the years and last year I was able to publish a lot of mosaic images like 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 about 100,000 pixels across, made up of 234 individual mosaic panels, covering an area of 125 by 22 degrees.
(© JP Metsavainio)
That’s a large part of the galactic plane, consisting of about 20 million stars, and the full-size color image measuring 7,000 by 1,300 pixels is actually leaking. The colors you see represent dispersions from ionized elements; hydrogen shown in green, sulfur in red, and oxygen in blue.
“I think this is the first ever image showing the Milky way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels,” Metsavainio told the photography website PetaPixel.
(© JP Metsavainio)
It offers a wonderfully good view of our home galaxy, and one we can’t help but miss. If you’re not sure where to start, or if you want to find out more about what you’re watching, Metsavainio has contributed a series of frames from the mosaic on his blog, showcasing individual nebulae.
We can also strongly recommend that you visit his pack to take an interesting walk through his body of work. His 3D animations of nebulae in particular will fill you with it bracken for intersexual space travel.